Apple’s M4 MacBook Pro seems to have made its way to Russian YouTubers after showing up on a private Facebook group in what might be the biggest pre-announcement leak of a retail-packaged Apple product.
Leaks and rumors around Apple products may seem commonplace, but there’s never been anything quite like what’s apparently happening on Russian YouTube. Just hours after YouTuber Wylsacom posted an unboxing of an alleged M4 MacBook Pro, another has done the same.
A YouTube Short shared by user Romancev768 shows an identical M4 MacBook Pro in space black with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM being unboxed. What ties this device to the ones leaked at the end of September are the identical boxes and model numbers.
There are some discrepancies between these boxes and Apple’s current retail boxes, like the format is completely different on the spec stickers. The wallpaper is the same on the alleged M4 MacBook Pro boxes as the M3 series, which plays into the potential that these are fake.
Apple has never broken out its chipset into the spec bubbles for the 512GB and 16GB — here it shows “M4 chip.” Apple usually puts the chip in the device name below these bubbles, as in “14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple M4 Pro chip.”
The new sticker has a completely different layout, but shows all of the usual regulatory information. These stickers are very easy to fake and print out, and it’s the only truly new and unique aspect that can be identified in any of the videos or leaks so far.
The alleged M4 MacBook Pro inside has three Thunderbolt ports, is colored space black, and has 16GB of RAM. A portion of the YouTube Short shows 16GB of RAM and M4 in an easily faked system info box.
Otherwise, the MacBook Pro shown could easily be the existing space black M3 Pro MacBook Pro, which has 18GB of RAM, not 16GB. The bump up to three Thunderbolt 4 ports from two Thunderbolt/USB-4 ports is a surprise, but not impossible.
It is also worth noting the model number and layout suggest these allegedly leaked models were destined for the US market. Apple doesn’t currently do business with Russia, so no new MacBook Pro models would be making their way to the country.
There is only one way to know if these leaks are accurate, and that is once Apple reveals the new MacBook Pro models with M4 later in October. If these products are real, they will represent the biggest leak of an Apple product in history, even after the iPhone 4 in a bar, since the packaging was leaked as well.
