• Apple’s High Power Mode speeds up cooling to enable better performance
• It’s now available on more Macs than before
• Limited testing suggests its benefits may not be huge

We already know that the M4 Pro chip inside AppleThe latest Macs are incredibly powerful – it punches holes in the Mac Pro’s M2 Ultraafter all. But you can get even more out of this little chip with a quick software tweak, and it’s now available on a wider range of Macs than ever before.

Dubbed High Power Mode, the setting in macOS Sequoia increases your Mac’s fans, providing better cooling to the machine. This in turn allows it to optimize its performance, which is particularly useful in sustained workloads such as video rendering and color grading, where increased cooling and performance can significantly reduce work times.

High power mode is available in the MacBook Pro and the Mac-miniprovided that they are equipped with the M4 Pro chip. This is an improvement over the previous situation, where only the MacBook Pro with M3 MaxM2 Max or M1 Max chips could use this setting. This means that not only is the barrier to entry lowered in terms of which chip you need, but it’s also now available for the first time in the Mac mini.

However, you may not find that high power mode offers a huge performance boost. Ars Technica tested the setting on the Mac mini, where reviewer Andrew Cunningham said the gains were “essentially negligible” but were accompanied by “significantly increased fan noise.”