A claimed early review of Apple's as-of-yet unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro M4 has appeared online, gaining the attention of many with its new configuration and M4 Apple silicon benchmarks.
The review has potentially been given further credibility after Bloomberg's Mark Gurman linked to it from his personal X account, claiming it to be unconfirmed but that it looks "fairly legitimate." The video is posted by a Russian YouTuber who shares the unboxing and full review of Apple's upcoming MacBook — weeks ahead of its official unveiling, which Gurman also suggests may now take place on November 1.
So what does this video reveal to us about the new M4-equipped Apple MacBook Pro 14, and is this video legitimate? Let's find out.
Early MacBook Pro M4 review: What does it tell us?
The claimed hands-on video of Apple's new MacBook Pro M4, which has amassed over 150K views since premiering yesterday, starts with a tongue-in-cheek greeting that highlights the clickbait nature of other content creators: "Hello my dear friends, today we're unpacking a MacBook that has not yet been announced."
However, YouTuber Wylsacon quickly snaps back into his own personality (and native Russian language), informing viewers that he won't be handling it as such — instead, dealing with it as any regular laptop review.
Wylsacon, whose real name is Valentin Valerievich Petukhov, then casually plays off how he came into possession of the new MacBook Pro M4 ahead of its announcement, simply claiming "I was just walking down the street here, [and] some gigantic/geeky looking dude jumped out of the bushes" (translated) before handing it to him.
True to his word (at least in that instance), Petukhov runs through the remainder of the video in a typical fashion — revealing a base configuration of 16GB of unified RAM and 512GB of storage powered by the M4 Apple silicon chipset. Beyond this, there are no apparent changes, with the supposed MacBook Pro M4 featuring the same Liquid Retina XDR 3024 x 1964 pixels display, HDMI, SDXC card, 3,5mm headphone jack, MagSafe 3 charging, and a trio of Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Early MacBook Pro M4 review: Is it real?
With all that said, how likely is this video to be legitimate? Well, there are plenty of signs that we're looking at a video that isn't telling us the whole story.
While the video itself seems convincing at first glance, Apple's lack of any expected radical redesign this year doesn't help when attempting to identify whether or not this is a new model of MacBook.
Petukhov's initial reveal of the M4 MacBook Pro product box also looks identical to the M3 MacBook Pro's, something that Apple are shown to change from generation to generation. In fact, taking the video at face value, Petukhov's unboxing looks identical to several other M3 MacBook Pro unboxings, down to the black MagSafe charging cable and white charging block.
In Petukhov's defense, it's possible that this box is not the final version of the retail packaging, and it does look similar to a box reportedly shown in a private Facebook group in September that featured a similar configuration shared by trusted Apple leaker ShrimpApplePro on X.
Not helping matters, at no point in the video does Petukhov show the "About This Mac" page of macOS to confirm its chipset or specs.
While Petukhov does share the results of a Geekbench benchmark test he claims to have performed himself, the numbers (3,864 single-core and 15,288 multi-core) line up exactly with Geekbench scores (found here and here) posted before his video was published (according to information found with the YouTube Data Viewer) and relate to the apparent testing of a 16-inch MacBook Pro M4, not the 14-inch model that Petukhov claims to show in his video.
Outlook
Can we say for certain that the video shared to YouTube is fake or real? Not with 100% certainty. However, there are enough clues here to suspect that, without further evidence, there's no guarantee that the MacBook Pro on show is Apple's upcoming model.
Much of the claimed information revealed within the review was previously leaked by other sources, making it highly possible that the laptop in question is simply a 14-inch MacBook Pro M3 masquerading as the upcoming model.
To know for sure, we'll need to see Apple reveal the new MacBook Pro models itself. While we originally presumed that this MacBook Pro event would take place in October, it's now suggested by some that Apple's M4 MacBook Pro reveal could be pushed back into November.
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