My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

One thing that wasn't mentioned is the max sustained screen brightness for SDR, which is higher on the M4 Pro (1000 nits) compared to the M4 Air or M1 Pro (500 nits).

There’s an awesome app called Vivid which just opens the HDR max brightness. I use it all the time with my M3 Pro when working outside and I believe it also works on earlier models.

There are so many base features that are inexplicably relegated to 3rd party apps. Like a better finder experience. Or keeping screen on. Or NTFS writing.

Finder is the number one reason it boggles my mind that people claim macOS as head and shoulders above other OSes "for professionals". Finder is a badly designed child's toy that does nothing at all intuitively and, in fact, actively does things in the most backwards ways possible. It's like taking the worst of Explorer (from Windows XP), and smashing it into the worst of Dolphin or Nautilus; and, to top it off, then hiding any and all remaining useful functionality behind obscure hot keys.

It has been more or less the same as long as I've used it (20 years or so). Familiarity is a plus. It is a pretty simple and straightforward tool. I'm not sure what you might find perplexing about Finder.

Who said it was perplexing? If anything, it's the opposite. It's so simple and rudimentary as to be antithetical to filesystem navigation.

Back/forward operate on history, not on hierarchy; at least have an "Up" button. There's no easy way to navigate the non-prescribed folders without adding every folder to the favorites list; hell, there's not even a "Home" link by default. Simple location navigation is hidden behind Cmd+G versus being evident. Easily jumping up the tree from your current location is hidden. Etc, etc, etc. It acts like the iPhone file manager, except the filesystem isn't a sandbox on macOS and you regularly need to navigate around it.

I'm sure if it's the only FS manager you ever use then it's just fine and you've learned all the quirks. But for people that regularly use other (better) managers on other OSes, it's severely lacking in ergonomics and functionality.