Alleged M4 MacBook Retail Box Leak Hints A Key Upgrade May Finally Happen

A sketchy leak purporting to show a photo of an unreleased 14-inch MacBook Pro refresh touting Apple's custom M4 silicon has found its way to the web, and with it comes possible confirmation of an upgrade to a key baseline specification. Namely, the system memory. If the image is to be believed, then Apple may indeed finally adorn its MacBook Pro family with no less than 16GB of RAM. There are important caveats, however, that we'll touch on shortly.

This has been the ongoing rumor for several weeks now, and as we previously noted, it's about time. This is 2024 (almost 2025), after all, and applying the "Pro" label (short for Professional) to a product with only 8GB of RAM is borderline insulting (and we're being generous with the "borderline" qualifier).

Sure, Apple's products have historically managed pretty well with less resources, but we're entering the era of AI workloads where having more system memory is nothing but helpful. Which is not to say anything about photo editing and video rendering—two more tasks of interest to professionals that can benefit greatly from more RAM.

The latest piece of evidence pointing to a 16GB RAM foundation comes from X/Twitter user ShrimpApplePro (@VNchocoTaco), who posted a photo that seemingly shows the retail packaging for Apple's upcoming MacBook refresh.

"M4 14" MacBook Pro? Not confirmed, take it with a pinch of salt. I got sent this," the user wrote on X/Twitter.

It's always prudent to take a leak or rumor with a healthy dose of skepticism, and in this case, the person sharing the image advises the same. And for good reasons. For one, this could be a fake image, and secondly, RAM and storage are both configurable specs within the MacBook Pro lineup. Even if the image is real, it doesn't necessarily indicate a baseline config.

That said, elsewhere in the image are references to 512GB of storage and a custom M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, the latter of which points to a lower end SKU—higher end configs are likely to offer M4 Pro and/or M4 Max configs with beefier specifications.

One other thing that's worth pointing out is that the system memory on MacBook Pros is unified, meaning it's shared with the GPU. That's all the more reason to cross your fingers that Apple finally sees fit to lift the floor from 8GB to 16GB.