Apple is a company known for its secrecy, so if someone claims to not only own a ready-made, unreleased M4 MacBook Pro, but then shows it off in full hands -Unboxing videos on YouTube, people tend to sit up and take notice.
And that’s exactly what seems to have happened last weekend, when Russian YouTuber Wylsacom published a video claims to depict a real M4 MacBook Pro before the device has even been announced. The YouTuber continued unboxing the device and shared their initial thoughts on the product, as well as some benchmark scores comparing it to previous Apple devices.
But is the MacBook in question actually legitimate? Well, there are a few signs that this could be the case. Wylsacom showed the back of the laptop’s box – with the serial number blacked out – revealing it contained a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage. It had a 10-core CPU (compared to 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 stated size and weight, which is the same as the existing M3 model. Whether the 16 GB memory is a new base configuration (as some rumors claim) or a build-to-order model is not clear.
Wylsacom also shared one Geekbench score which they claimed matches the M4 chip found in this leaked MacBook. The benchmark suggests 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 starters, this MacBook apparently uses the exact same front-of-box design as the previous M3 series MacBook Pro laptops. That’s suspicious – Apple updates the wallpapers its MacBooks use almost flawlessly every time a new one comes out, so it’s suspicious to have a new model that apparently reuses an old design. This is the same issue we raised when the M4 MacBook Pro was supposedly leaked last week.
In addition, the box states that the MacBook comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports. That’s strange, because in the M3 generation, all MacBook Pros with the M3 chip had two Thunderbolt 3 ports – a lower number and a previous generation – and only the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions had three Thunderbolt 4 -slots. Still, Wylsacom’s leak shows that a base-level M4 MacBook Pro will get three Thunderbolt 4 ports. Is this an indication that the leak isn’t real, 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 we can’t confirm for now. The box reveals a model number of A3112 and SKU of MW2U3LL/A, which do not match existing MacBook devices. Similarly, the Geekbench score uses the model ID Mac16,1, which has not been used before. These things could be fake, or they could be real – we don’t know for now. Likewise, 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 this is an indication that this is fake or if Apple has changed its policy on MacBook colors.
The leak also raises questions about how exactly Wylsacom got its hands on the MacBook Pro. Russia is currently facing sanctions due to the war in Ukraine, and Apple has officially withdrawn from the country in response, making obtaining the company’s products very difficult. There are ways for Russian citizens to get this sort of thing despite the sanctions, but Wylsacom’s possession of an unreleased MacBook Pro from a company obsessed with product safety – despite there being no official ways to get one – could be food for thought can turn on.
Leaking a fully functioning Apple product before it’s even announced is incredibly rare, and if this happens in Russia – where obtaining official Apple products is difficult enough, let alone pre-release products – suggests that it may be wise to be skeptical about this. leak. Still, it’s a pretty convincing fake if it is indeed fake.
Either way, we’ll know for sure when Apple announces its next line of MacBook Pros, which is expected to happen later in October. If this leak turns out to be real, Apple will raise serious questions about how this could have happened.
