Your new M4 Mac can pack even more power than before
- Apple’s High Power Mode increases cooling to enable better performance
- It’s now available on more Macs than before
- Limited testing suggests its benefits may not be huge
We already know that the M4 Pro chip in Apple’s latest Macs is impressively powerful; after all, it’s blowing holes in the Mac Pro’s M2 Ultra. But you can get even more out of this little chip with a quick software tweak, and it’s now available on a wider range of Macs than ever before.
The setting in macOS Sequoia, called High Power Mode, increases your Mac’s fans, helping to cool the machine better. This allows it to maximize its performance, which is especially useful for long-term workloads such as video rendering and color correction, where improved cooling and performance can noticeably reduce operating times.
High Power mode is available on the MacBook Pro and Mac mini, provided they are equipped with the M4 Pro chip. This is an improvement over the previous situation, where only the MacBook Pro with M3 Max, M2 Max or M1 Max chips could use this setting. It means that not only has the barrier to entry been lowered in terms of which chip you need, but it’s now available for the first time in the Mac mini.
However, you may not notice that High Power mode offers a huge performance boost. Ars Technica tested the setting in the Mac mini, where reviewer Andrew Cunningham said the gain was “essentially negligible” but was still accompanied by “significantly more fan noise.”
While testing the new M4 Pro MacBooks, we also found that enabling High Power mode made only a small difference in the benchmark results, and certainly nothing major.
But before you write off this article completely, Cunningham did acknowledge that his tests were short and that you might see a bigger effect over a longer period of time. That lines up with Apple’s comment that High Power mode is designed for “sustained” or “intensive” workloads.
We would be very surprised if Apple added a feature like High Power Mode if it offers no significant benefits but also comes with a noisy drawback. Chances are you’ll see some improvement if the mode is enabled for longer-lasting workloads. But without testing it ourselves, we can’t be absolutely sure.
Still, it’s good to see this feature being expanded to more affordable Macs. It means you can get High Power Mode for $1,399 (in the M4 Pro Mac mini), as opposed to the previous starting price of $3,199 for the M3 Max MacBook Pro. No matter how much performance improvement it offers, that’s nothing to sniff at.
