The most expensive MacBook Pro (2021) costs over $6,000

Apple just held its Unleashed event, and with it came two massive MacBook Pro announcements. The new MacBook Pro models bring back classic ports like HDMI and MagSafe charging, but most notably, they come with the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors. As Apple highlighted during the event, the new MacBook Pro models are beastly machines, but with a starting price of $1,999, they certainly have a cost to match. But just how expensive can they get? Let’s take a look at the price much you can expect to pay if you want to max out all the specs in your model.

First off, let’s take a look at the MacBook Pro 16-inch. This model starts at $2,499, and that includes an Apple M1 Pro with 10 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, 16GB of unified memory (RAM), and 512GB of SSD storage. However, all of this can be upgraded significantly. If you opt to upgrade to the M1 Max processor, you’ll be paying at least $3,099, and that’s including a 24-core GPU and 32GB of unified memory. If you upgrade to the M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, the minimum becomes $3,299.

From there, you can upgrade the RAM and storage all the way up to 64GB of unified memory and an 8TB SSD. If you max out all the configurations in the MacBook Pro 16-inch, it’ll cost you $6,099.99, which isn’t exactly a light hit on the wallet. As for the MacBook Pro 14-inch model, the starting price is $1,999 with an Apple M1 Pro with 8 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores, but you can upgrade it to be just as powerful as the 16-inch version. If you do, you’ll be paying $5,899.99.

Comparing that to other powerful professional laptops in the Windows space – say, the Dell XPS 15 – that costs just over $5,000 with the same amount of RAM and storage, as well as an Intel Core i9 processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics, and a 4K display. Even if you take the Dell XPS 17 and you max that out with an Intel Core i9-11980HK and GeForce RTX 3060, you’re still looking at around $5,400.

Granted, Apple touted some impressive performance numbers during its presentation, including up to 4 times the GPU performance of an AMD Radeon Pro 5600M using the M1 Max chipset. But some of the difference is also in the RAM and storage upgrades. For example, going from 1TB to 8TB of storage on the Dell XPS 17 costs $1,800, but on Apple’s MacBook Pro models, you pay $2,2000 for that upgrade, a $400 difference. Similarly, a RAM upgrade from 32GB to 64GB costs $300 on Dell’s laptop, versus $400 on the MacBook Pro.

No matter how you slice it, the new MacBook Pro models aren’t cheap, especially if you want the max configurations. This is no different from previous models, though, so it’s not like Apple has jacked up the prices at the high end. If you’re interested in buying it, you can configure the laptop below.