Apple’s latest MacBook Pro ramps up the power with M3 hardware and new Space Black color
Similar design but much better performance.
Taking all of us by surprise, Apple held a launch event earlier to show off the latest Macs. Headlining the series is the uber-poweful MacBook Pro. Apple has upgraded the 14 and 16-inch pro laptop models with M3-level processors – the M3 Pro and M3 Max. You can expect faster performance on these machines, in addition to other improvements across the board.
Debuting on the new MacBook Pro models, M3 is the first chipset in the industry made using 3nm technologies. We saw this with iPhone 15‘s chip as well. It lets Apple cram even more into the processor, for even better performance. The biggest change is the GPU, bringing the biggest upgrade to Apple silicon. Dynamic caching lets the GPU use local memory so only the exact amount that’s needed for each task gets used – bumping performance significantly.
It lets hardware accelerated mesh shading deliver more complicated scenes, and hardware accelerated ray tracing to Mac for the first time. It lets games render more realistic shadows. This combo lets pro apps deliver up to 2.5x fast rendering than the M1 chips. The CPUs are around 15% faster than M2, and around 30% faster than M1. The standard M3 offers an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU. M3 Pro offers a 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, and is 40% faster than M1. M3 Max is even more powerful with a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU, and is up to 80% faster than the two-year-old M1 Max.
You can nab the 14-inch MacBook Pro with all three of the chips, or the 16-inch with the M3 Pro or M3 Max. It confirms that the 13-inch model with touchbar is dead, thankfully. Most features on the upgraded laptop look pretty familiar. You get up to 22 hours of battery life, the stunning Liquid Retina XDR display, six on-board speakers, a MagSafe charger, HDMI port, Thunderbolt 4 port, and support for four external displays.
MacBook Pro is now available in Space Black, the darkest colour on a Mac yet. The new pro machines ship running macOS Sonoma from launch, brining you the latest features. You can order the 14-inch from $1599/£1699 and the 16-inch from $2499/£2599. You can order the new notebooks from today, and they’ll be on the way from 7 November. But, you’ll have to wait a few extra weeks for any M3 Max orders.
Connor Jewiss