Leaks of the yet-to-be-announced M4 MacBook Pro have been getting weirder and weirder lately. First, it was up for sale on Facebook. And now, as spotted by MacRumors, there seems to be an entire unboxing video of it on YouTube.
Weirder yet, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman retweeted the Russian YouTuber Wylsacom’s video with the comment: “Unconfirmed but looks fairly legitimate.” This isn’t some unknown YouTube channel, either. He currently sits at 11.3 million subscribers.
Unconfirmed but looks fairly legitimate: a Russian YouTube channel claims to have the yet to be announced M4 MacBook Pro and gave it a full unboxing and hands-on. We’ve seen prototypes leak early but never a full retail Apple device weeks in advance. https://t.co/LYrt68ZmEn
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) October 6, 2024
It’s worth pointing out here that no leak of this level has happened at Apple before — if it’s real, we’re talking about a finalized product getting into the hands of a consumer before it has even been announced.
As for how it got into the hands of this particular consumer — who knows. Apple isn’t doing business in Russia at the moment and the box is in English, so it must have come from somewhere else. Maybe this YouTuber really did buy it from that private Facebook group. But even if that was the case, getting the laptop into Russia is a whole other problem they would have needed to get around.
The major problem with the other leaks also exists here — the box still shows the M3 wallpaper on it, almost making it look like someone just changed the text on the bottom of a normal M3 box. As we’ve said before, Apple always changes its wallpapers.
But let’s say we entertain the idea of this leak being real — here’s what the video suggests about the next MacBook Pro refresh:
- It could potentially come with a minimum of 16GB of RAM, just as the rumors have been suggesting (or it could be a built-to-order model.)
- It could have three Thunderbolt 4 ports, according to the underside of the box. The YouTuber didn’t show the ports in the video. In the previous generation, only the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions had three Thunderbolt ports.
- The color shown is Space Black, which is currently only available for M3 Pro or M3 Max configurations, suggesting it could come to base chip configurations, too.
- According to the Geekbench 6 benchmark the YouTube channel shared, the M4 chip can deliver up to 25% faster performance than the M3 chip.
This means, that if the leak is real, Apple has changed the minimum amount of RAM, the number of Thunderbolt ports, and the color range for the base model.
Alternatively, we’re just looking at an M3 Pro or M3 Max MacBook Pro with a box that has been tampered with. It’s not possible to say for sure whether it’s fake or not, but if it’s not, there must be a lot of trouble going down in the Apple offices right now.
