Apple’s known for locking down its secrets under lock and key. But not these past few weeks.
The company hasn’t even announced the M4 MacBook Pro, yet we’ve apparently learned pretty much everything there is to know about the upcoming laptop thanks to a series of purported high-profile leaks and unboxing videos that have shown off the device from every angle. For a firm as security conscious as Apple, having the MacBook Pro spoiled in this way is close to catastrophic.
But for people like you and me? It’s been pretty enlightening. If these leaks prove to be accurate, they’ve given us a glimpse into what we can expect from the M4 MacBook Pro. And that glimpse is pretty enticing.
First, let’s recap the leaks. Things kicked off in late September when leaker ShrimpApplePro posted a photo purporting to show the packaging of the M4 MacBook Pro. Shortly after, two separate Russian YouTubers claimed to have obtained actual units of the laptop, which they unboxed and analyzed in videos on their channels. And not long after that, rumors started spreading that people were actually selling the M4 MacBook Pro on Facebook and on a Russian classifieds website, with 200 units reportedly up for grabs.
That’s a major departure from most Apple launch cycles. Sure, every year we get a few details posted ahead of time, meaning there’s always an element of familiarity with what Apple reveals on the day. But full-blown unboxing videos? That’s almost unheard of. The last time Apple suffered a security lapse this disastrous was when an employee accidentally left the then-secret iPhone 4 in a California bar, with the unit eventually finding its way into the hands of the press. That was nearly 15 years ago, and this latest incident is no doubt bringing back some painful memories for Apple’s top brass.
What the leaks reveal
If these are authentic M4 MacBook Pro laptops and they’ve somehow been swiped from Apple’s supply chain, it potentially represents one of the worst security breaches in Apple’s history. And it also reveals a lot about what we might see in Apple’s next flagship laptop.
For one thing, every instance of the purportedly leaked M4 MacBook Pro shows the same specs: M4 chip, 16GB of memory, and 512GB of storage. Right now, the base-level M3 MacBook Pro comes with 512GB of storage but only 8GB of memory. Could this be a hint that the entry-level M4 MacBook Pro will get double the RAM of its M3 equivalent? Hopefully.
It’s certainly possible, and sources like Mark Gurman have contended for a while that this will happen. It could also simply be that the leaked MacBooks are a stepped-up configuration. Ultimately, there’s not really any way of knowing whether they are the most affordable model or not.
Still, there are other clues we can glean from the leaks. They suggest that the M4 MacBook Pro will come in Space Black, a color that is currently limited to laptops bearing Apple’s M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. The boxes shown in the leaked photos and videos also indicate that the MacBooks in question come with three Thunderbolt 4 ports. This is a double upgrade, since the M3 MacBook Pro currently only has two Thunderbolt ports, and both of those ports are the lower-spec Thunderbolt 3. If you like to connect peripherals to your MacBook Pro, this will be a welcome upgrade.
Then there’s the improved performance we can expect to see from the M4 chip. We already know a little about this since the M4 is in the current iPad Pro, but Wylsacom — one of the leakers who posted video footage of the M4 MacBook Pro — has claimed to have benchmarked the new chip in Apple’s laptop.
On Geekbench, Wylsacom’s testing shows the M4 chip offering roughly 27% higher single-core performance and about 31% better multi-core performance compared to the M3. Elsewhere, M4 benchmarks for Apple’s Metal API have also appeared, and these indicate that the M4’s GPU offers an improvement of around 20% over the M3. If true, that’s certainly nothing to scoff at.
Apple’s leaky supply chain
There’s another thing we can learn from this whole situation: Apple’s security may not be as robust as we once thought it was. The company is well-known for coming after people who post pictures and videos of pre-release products, with some leakers being fined and even serving prison time for their efforts. Yet that apparently hasn’t stopped a security breach of this magnitude from taking place.
Ever since the first images of the M4 MacBook Pro broke onto the internet, more outlandish rumors have been swirling, with claims surfacing that up to 200 units of the laptop have been privately listed for sale. Apple has stayed silent on the entire matter, but there’s no doubt the company is furiously investigating the incident and trying to ascertain whether it’s dealing with a genuine leak or a highly convincing forgery.
And that raises some interesting questions for us as viewers, too. Most pertinently: should we trust these leaks? On the surface, they appear persuasive. We’re not looking at some small-time operation here — multiple people have obtained fully functioning Apple laptops that appear to contain unreleased chips and new features. That’s not easy to pull off.
But there’s nothing that conclusively proves that these laptops are something different from what’s come before, albeit cleverly disguised. The About This Mac page in macOS that shows the laptop’s internal chip can be faked, as can Geekbench results. We don’t know for sure that these devices aren’t simply a set of M3 Pro MacBook Pros with some software tricks obscuring their internal chip’s specs. Those devices come with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, 512GB of memory and a Space Black finish, after all.
I’m not saying that these definitely are fakes — there are plenty of reasons to believe that they could be authentic. I’m just saying that we can’t know for sure either way right now. The whole thing is murky and muddy, and it’s not getting any clearer. The laptops’ veracity is the one thing that these leaks haven’t confirmed for us.
The only way that this matter will be settled is seeing Apple discuss the M4 MacBook Pro at its rumored October launch event in the coming weeks. If the laptop revealed at the show is the same as the one we’ve seen plastered all over the internet, we’ll know the sheer scale of Apple’s containment failure.
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