Apple’s High Power Mode ramps up cooling to enable better performanceIt’s now available in more Macs than beforeLimited testing suggests its benefits might not be enormous
We already know that the M4 Pro chip inside Apple’s latest Macs is impressively powerful – it blows holes in the Mac Pro’s M2 Ultra, after all. But you can eke even more juice out of this little chip with a quick software tweak, and it’s now available in a larger range of Macs than ever before.
Dubbed High Power Mode, the setting in macOS Sequoia ramps up your Mac’s fans, providing better cooling to the machine. That in turn allows it to max out its performance, which is particularly useful in sustained workloads like video rendering and color grading, where increased cooling and performance can noticeably shorten working times.
High Power Mode is available in the MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, provided they’re outfitted with the M4 Pro chip. This is an improvement on 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 is the barrier to entry lowered in terms of the chip you need, but it’s also now available in the Mac mini for the first time.
However, you might not find that High Power Mode provides a huge boost in performance. Ars Technica tested the setting in the Mac mini, where reviewer Andrew Cunningham said that the gains were “essentially negligible” yet came with “considerably increased fan noise.”
During our time testing the new M4 Pro MacBooks, we also found that turning on High Power Mode made only a little difference in benchmark results, and certainly nothing too mind-blowing.
But before you write the feature off entirely, Cunningham did acknowledge that his tests were brief and that you might see a larger effect over a longer period of time. That chimes with Apple’s note that High Power Mode is designed for “sustained” or “intensive” workloads.
We would be very surprised to see Apple include a feature like High Power Mode if it provides no significant benefits while also bringing a noisy drawback, and it’s likely you’ll see some improvement while the mode is enabled for more sustained workloads. But without testing it ourselves, we can’t be absolutely sure.
Still, it’s good to see this feature extended to more affordable Macs. It means that 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. Regardless of how much of a performance boost it provides, that’s nothing to sniff at.
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