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.

That $300 price cut applies if you decide to upgrade the RAM or the chip as well. For example, you can get the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro, 48GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD for $2,599 (regular price $2,

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.

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.

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,

The M3 MacBook Air deals have been flying ever since Apple upgraded the lineup with elevated RAM configurations starting at 16GB, but Amazon just took things up a notch. Several of the configurations have now dropped in price again to deliver the lowest prices we have tracked to date.

The new M4 MacBook Pros that launched last month have an unadvertised change with new quantum dot displays, according to display industry analyst Ross Young and reported by 9to5Mac. Young posted on X that Apple is adopting quantum dot displays for the first time and that it's using a version of the film that is free of cadmium,

This specific configuration of the M4 Pro has a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The 16GB of RAM is particularly noteworthy, as it’s the new standard for Apple. That makes this a better deal than some of the M3 models with 8GB of RAM.

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.

Amazon's official Black Friday Deals Week event starts now and we have live coverage of today's best Apple deals, including new low prices on M4 Macs, the 2024 iPad mini 7, current Apple Watch models and more.