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.

A trio of retailers are fighting for your money, by offering the 1TB 14-inch MacBook Pro with an upgraded M4 Pro chip at $300 off the list price.

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

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.

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,

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 biggest reason to upgrade to the MacBook Pro M4 is the performance. This machine gets the newest M4 chip that is based on a 3-nanometer process, promising the fastest CPU core and better multithreaded performance than M3. Based on our testing, the M4 blows a lot of the competition away but not on every test.

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.