The best laptops of 2025: Compare the M4 MacBook Air, Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, and more
A majestic piece of modern machinery, Apple's jacked new 16-inch, M4 Pro-fueled MacBook Pro is a future-proofed investment for creative professionals who run intense multimedia-editing apps and software on a regular basis.Read Mashable's full review of the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).
Put simply, this MacBook Pro is a beauteous behemoth. With a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 22,758, it's the fastest laptop we've ever tested by a not-close margin. (The runner-up, Lenovo's $3,599.99 Legion Pro 7i 16 OLED Gen 10, scored a 20,369.) It "can handle heavy workloads without a single stutter," said Gedeon. It's also incredibly long-lasting, surviving for nearly 21 hours in our battery life benchmark. Out of all the MacBooks we've ever tested, it has the second-best battery life. That's really impressive considering how powerful it is.While it may look like a pretty standard MacBook on the outside — minimalist, relatively thin, made from aluminum — Apple's tacked on a few subtle but noteworthy design upgrades from the previous generation. For one, it now comes with three next-gen Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports for zippy data transfer speeds. (These accompany an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 charging port, and a headphone jack.) Two, it can hit up to 1000 nits of SDR brightness, a bump from 600 nits in its M3 Pro predecessor. There's also an option to add a glare-reducing "nano-texture" display finish, which wowed Gedeon when she took the laptop into her backyard: "I didn't have to squint, adjust angles, nor play hide-and-seek with shadows," she wrote. And three, the new MacBook Pro's camera is now a 12MP Center Stage shooter (up from 1080p) with support for Desk View, a new feature that produces an overhead view of the user's desk.Its six-speaker setup is the same one you'll find in the M3-era Pros, but no complaints there. Gedeon likened its audio quality to a "gourmet apple pie ... piping hot, golden, and worth every sinful calorie."And by calories, we mean dollars. It's tempting to recommend the M4 Pro MacBook Pro to anyone who values power efficiency in a laptop, but its price point keeps it firmly in "experts-only" territory. (Our upgraded testing unit with 48GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and a nano-texture display came in at $3,649; the base configuration goes for $2,499.) Don't bother with the splurge unless you'll make full use of it on the daily. For what it's worth, though, we also like the new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro for those with less strenuous workloads; that one starts at $1,599.
