The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are still the best laptops for creative professionals. This year they’re a little faster, with better webcams, new anti-glare screen options, and that’s mostly it. When you’re editing photos in the middle of a wedding, every second counts. I occasionally moonlight as a wedding photographer. It’s a high-stress job that involves taking thousands of photos throughout a 10-hour workday and never missing a crucial moment. And the team I work on goes above and beyond: our goal is to get a set of photos picked, edited, and on display before the happy couple is cutting their cake. That rapid-fire editing process usually takes about two hours on an M1 Max MacBook Pro. But a couple of weekends ago, I brought along our review unit of the new M4 Max MacBook Pro. It took just half the time. The M4 Max is the most powerful of Apple’s new M4 processors. It was released this November alongside the M4 Pro, and it’s available in both the 14- and 16-inch versions of Apple’s top laptops. While the entry-level M4 MacBook Pro saw excellent improvements this year thanks to an added port and speed gains, the higher-end M4 Pro and M4 Max models mostly received year-over-year chip bumps with some slightly faster ports. They’re not the most exciting upgrades around, but they represent the best performance Apple can offer in a laptop. Instead of just running the same ol’ benchmarks to tell you how the bigger numbers are better, I asked our readers what they wanted to see. And mostly, they wanted three things: photo editing, video editing, and gaming. So I handed off our M4 Pro review unit to one of our video producers to use in his editing workflow for The Verge’s videos on YouTube and TikTok. I took the M4 Max to a wedding and back to test photo editing. And I played a bunch of games along the way.