Chip, memory, battery and power upgrades add to laptop’s appeal along with new webcam and Apple Intelligence

Apple’s upgraded MacBook Pro for 2024 gets a significant power boost with the M4 chip, double the memory as standard, even longer battery life and a price cut, ending the year on a high.

The longstanding laptop line now starts at £1,599 (€1,899/$1,599/A$2,499), making it £100 or so cheaper than last year’s M3 models . Though still an expensive, premium laptop, it comes with at least 16GB of RAM rather than 8GB, which was an upgrade worth paying extra for on previous models.

Screen: 14.2in mini LED (3024x1964; 254 ppi) ProMotion (120Hz)

Processor: Apple M4, Pro or Max

RAM: 16, 24, 32 or up to 128GB

Storage: 512GB, 1, 2, 4 or 8TB SSD

Operating system: macOS 15.1 Sequoia

Camera: 12MP Centre Stage

Connectivity: wifi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 3x Thunderbolt 4/USB 4, HDMI 2.1, SD card, headphones

Dimensions: 221.2 x 312.6 x 15.5mm

Weight: 1.55kg

Egypt hopes the Forever is Now exhibition of contemporary artists, now in its fourth year, will bring even more visitors to the Unesco heritage site

A dismantled chariot, recreated in the form of two unruly metallic horses next to half-submerged wheels, and giant flowers popping out of the sand: visitors to the pyramids of Giza are being greeted by a series of artworks as Egypt stages its annual contemporary art exhibition at the 4,500-year-old Unesco world heritage site.

The Race by Khaled Zaki, which depicts a dismantled chariot. Zaki says putting art in front of the pyramids was an honour and a challenge. Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Kathryn Bigelow’s action-bromance about bank-robbing surfer dudes is an enduring cult gem, thanks to its joining of tropes and tones

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s crazy action romp from 1991 now gets a rerelease. Eric Hobsbawm might have called it the final moment of The Long Eighties Decade of Action Movies, with shootouts, PAEs (pointless action explosions) and a recurring prosthetic cameo for Ronald Reagan. Bigelow’s feminist achievement in showing she could make an action movie as well as any man was perhaps, but probably not, underscored by a brief scene in which leading man Keanu Reeves gets a savage beatdown from a naked young woman.

Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing. Straight-arrow rookie federal agent Johnny Utah, played by Reeves – inscrutable and husky-voiced as ever – is posted to LA, where he’s partnered-cute with an older and irascible officer. This is Pappas, played by Gary Busey, who brusquely remarks how Los Angeles has changed in the past 20 years. “The air got dirty and the sex got clean.” (This is a surfing movie and as such really has to be set on the west coast; we know what Robert Duvall’s surf enthusiast Lt Col Kilgore in Apocalypse Now thought about people from New Jersey who presumed to voice an opinion.)

Petition demands council hold binding referendum on issue after local people say they have been priced out

Housing activists in Lisbon are to hand over a petition, signed by more than 6,600 residents, calling on city officials to agree to hold a binding referendum on banning tourist lets in residential blocks.

The effort, months in the making, is aimed at prompting decisive action in a city where the cost of housing has drastically outpaced local salaries. “Short-term rentals take most of the housing space in Lisbon’s historic centre,” said Raquel Antunes, a member the group Movement for a Housing Referendum. “We need to put the brakes on this.”

Rose Matafeo and Mike Wozniak put a bunch of canny kids to the test. Plus, Greg Davies cleans up for the last time. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
The remarkable rise of Taskmaster over the past decade proves that sometimes we just need daft, pointless telly. It’s a genius move, then, to add kids into the mix. Rose Matafeo is in charge of events and, with the help of her assistant, Mike Wozniak, sets challenges for a cohort of very spirited youngsters. It would be a mistake to underestimate these smart cookies – but that doesn’t mean they don’t also provide some hilariously stupid moments, just like the adults. Good fun for fans of any age. Hollie Richardson

With $500bn worth of trade in the crosshairs of Donald Trump’s tariffs, Xi Jinping is preparing for four more years of unpredictability

China is bracing itself for four years of volatile relations with its biggest trading partner and geopolitical rival, as the dust settles on the news that Donald Trump will once again be in the White House.

On Thursday China’s president, Xi Jinping, congratulated Trump on his victory and said that the two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, according to a Chinese government readout.

Close races in states where counting is still underway called in to question as claims of fraud in presidential vote quieten

Activists are using Donald Trump’s decisive victory to further question the 2020 election results and sow doubts about close US senate races where ballots are still being counted.

While they’ve been quiet about fraud in the presidential election this year, activists pointed to the unofficial total number of votes cast, noting that 20m more ballots had been cast in 2020. Ignoring the reality that there are millions of votes still being counted in states like California, Arizona and Nevada, they suggested the incomplete number was somehow evidence there were fake ballots in 2020.

The PM has a duty to pull any levers he can to ameliorate the president-elect’s global impact. And the war-gaming is well under way

Dawn had barely broken, and nor had Kamala Harris publicly conceded, when Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to the not-quite-officially President-elect Donald Trump.

Britain would, he said, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, as it always does. Though he got the early opportunity he wanted to congratulate the new president-elect even more fulsomely down the phone, those words will have been gut-wrenching for many people. How can it be business as usual, with a president whose own former chief of staff said he met the definition of a fascist? What on earth makes Starmer think he can influence Trump for the better, the usual rationale for engaging with unsavoury leaders, where Trump’s own advisers repeatedly failed? The only people he ever really heeded, the British-born former White House adviser Fiona Hill once told one of Theresa May’s aides, were the now late Queen and the pope.

Rise in unemployment in low hundreds of thousands as technology creates roles, Tony Blair Institute suggests

Artificial intelligence could displace between 1m and 3m private sector jobs in the UK, though the ultimate rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands as growth in the technology also creates new roles, according to Tony Blair’s thinktank.

Between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs will be displaced every year over a couple of decades at the peak of the disruption, estimates from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) suggest.