The M4 represents as much of a philosophical shift as it does a performance upgrade. It is Apple acknowledging that if you’re buying a laptop with “Pro” in the name, than it should be a better machine.

They were launched less than two months ago, they are outstanding products, and yet Amazon is offering substantial discounts on them.

Apple's new M4 MacBook Pro has a significant upgrade to the display, and the company somehow forgot to mention it.

The M4's single-core performance is between 14 and 21 percent faster than the M3s in our tests, and tests that use all the CPU cores are usually 20 or 30 percent faster. The GPU is occasionally as much as 33 percent faster than the M3 in our tests, though more often, the improvements are in the single or low double digits.

I tested a beautiful Space Black MacBook Pro with the new M4 Pro chip and 48GB memory (which I would treasure if it belonged to me). The 3-nanometer chip it uses has 14 cores, consisting of 10 performance and four efficiency cores; it has a 2TB drive; a Liquid Retina XDR nanotexture display; and it costs $3,349.

The M4 MacBook Pro is pretty stellar. Apple made it far better than the previous generation — without increasing the cost. That includes bumping up the memory of the base configuration to 16GB, improving the webcam,

AM EST This story has been updated with new laptop deals ahead of Black Friday. Black Friday is the absolute best time for finding good deals on laptops. (I would know: I've tracked them for Mashable since 2019.