Apple is a company that’s well-known for its secrecy, so when someone claims to not only have a ready-to-go, as-yet-unreleased M4 MacBook Pro in their possession, but then proceeds to show it off in a full hands-on unboxing video on YouTube, people tend to sit up and take notice.
And that’s exactly what seems to have happened over the weekend, when Russian YouTuber Wylsacom published a video claiming to depict a genuine M4 MacBook Pro before the device has even been announced. The YouTuber proceeded to unbox the device and share their initial thoughts on the product, as well as some benchmarking scores comparing it to previous Apple devices.
But is the MacBook in question actually legitimate? Well, there are a few signs that suggest that it could be. Wylsacom showed the back of the laptop’s box – obscuring the serial number in the process – which revealed that it contained a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage. It had a 10-core CPU (up from the 8-core M3 and in line with what the iPad Pro’s M4 has) and a 10-core GPU. That all seems reasonable, as does the listed size and weight, which is the same as the existing M3 model. Whether the 16GB of memory is a new base configuration (as some rumors have claimed) or is a built-to-order model isn’t clear.
Wylsacom also shared a Geekbench score that they claimed corresponds to the M4 chip found in this leaked MacBook. The benchmark suggests that the M4 is up to 25% faster than Apple’s M3 chip, and that matches the kind of performance we’ve seen in the latest iPad Pro, which also comes with a 10-core M4 chip.
However, not everything is so convincing. For one thing, this MacBook is apparently using the exact same design on the front of its box as the previous M3 series of MacBook Pro laptops. That’s suspicious – Apple almost unfailingly updates the wallpapers its MacBooks use every time a fresh one is released, so to have a new model apparently reusing an old design is suspect. This is the same issue that we raised when the M4 MacBook Pro was supposedly leaked last week.
As well as that, the box notes that the MacBook comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports. That’s odd because in the M3 generation, all MacBook Pros with the M3 chip came with two Thunderbolt 3 ports – a lower number and a previous generation – and only the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions got three Thunderbolt 4 slots. Yet Wylsacom’s leak shows a base-level M4 MacBook Pro getting three Thunderbolt 4 ports. Is this a clue that the leak is not genuine, or has Apple decided to increase the number and generation of Thunderbolt slots on the entry-level MacBook Pro? We can’t know for sure until the product is announced.
There are a few other things that we can’t confirm either way for now. The box reveals a model number of A3112 and SKU of MW2U3LL/A, which don’t match any existing MacBook devices. Similarly, the Geekbench score uses the model identifier Mac16,1, which hasn’t been used before. These things could be faked, or they could be real – we can’t know for now. Similarly, this base-level MacBook Pro is available in space black, which was previously reserved for the M3 Pro and M3 Max models. We’ll have to see if that’s a giveaway that this is fake or if Apple has changed its policy on MacBook colors.
The leak also raises questions over how exactly Wylsacom got hold of the MacBook Pro. Russia is currently facing sanctions over its war in Ukraine, and Apple has officially pulled out of the country in response, making obtaining the company’s products very difficult. There are ways that Russian citizens can obtain items like this despite the sanctions, but Wylsacom’s possession of an unreleased MacBook Pro from a company that’s obsessed with product security – despite no official ways to get one – might give pause for thought.
Leaking a fully functioning Apple product before it is even announced is incredibly rare, and for it to happen in Russia – where getting official Apple products is hard enough, never mind pre-release ones – suggests that it may be wise to be skeptical of this leak. Still, it’s a pretty convincing fake if it is indeed bogus.
Either way, we’ll find out for sure when Apple announces its next line of MacBook Pros, which is expected to happen later this October. If this leak proves to be genuine, there will be serious questions at Apple over how it could have happened.
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alexblake.techradar@gmail.com (Alex Blake)
