M3 Chip Family Boosts Performance for MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMac

Article Comments
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  1. Keyboard Spacing

I’ve got the 14 which replaced a 2015 15 inch model MBP…the keyboard is the same on both. The screen is so much better than the old Intel models and the dot pitch is about the same on both sizes so it’s just more pixels wide and tall…much easier to read even for old eyes like you and me.

  1. Screen readability (biggest contributor to differential weight is probably screen size)

Readability is the same…although I don’t have experience with the 16 I’ve looked at both side by side in the store.

  1. Totability (even though more and more TSA agents permit me to leave shoes on (age 76) and devices sheaved, that ballistic nylon bag is still HEAVY with an 11" iPAD Pro, iPhone 14Pro, 16" MacBook Pro, external SSD clone, chargers, etc., all weighing it down

Unless you’re doing things professionally that require the larger pixel screen or never leave the house, I find it hard to recommend the 16 based on weight. The 16 is actually just about the same size and weight as the old 15 “ models was and a little smaller and lighter than the Intel 16 due to smaller bezels…but it’s still too heavy to schlep around a lot IMO.

  1. Number of TB ports (I rarely need more than 2, and with one TB/USBc port now freed up by the return of MagSafe, I doubt that I’ll EVER need more than 2.

All the MBPs have the same port config…3 TB/USB-C, MagSafe, headphones.

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Agreed. I got a 16 two years ago and it’s pretty hefty. I wish I’d gotten the 14.

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The low-end 14” plain M3 only has 2 TB/USB-C ports. They all also have HDMI ports and SD card slots, too.

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You’re right…shoulda looked better at the specs instead of just the picture when I was answering before.

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The 14" and 16" have identical KBs. Just like the 13"/15" MBA.

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Neil and Simon, thanks so much for your replies. It adds to my interest in an after-midnight trip to NYC’s 5th Avenue Apple Retail Store (in the interest of my sleep, I’ll probably do it in the early hours of 11/8 rather than 11/7, although the question brings to mind ANOTHER excursion, this time to visit my sister in Traverse City, MI a few decades ago. UA took me from SFO to ORD in the morning rush hour with no problem, but shortly after I arrived incoming Chicago traffic was reduced to almost nothing and outbound totally shutdown by day-long thunderstorms, which prevented ground crews from venturing outside. It got SO bad that there were no visible lines anywhere, just an enormous mélange of people with little room to move. To make matters worse, UA had offloaded customer telephone support to India, where the agents were always friendly but sorely lacking in any knowledge of American geography. By 3 pm I assumed I’d be sleeping on the floor at O’Hare, so I tried to book a nearby hotel, but thousands of similarly inconvenienced passengers had tumbled to that awful reality before me, So, I decided I’d just rent a car, loop around the bottom of Lake Michigan and up its coast to Traverse City. Hertz, however, had other ideas, specifically “no cars available today, but you can rent one tomorrow morning.”

“What TIME tomorrow,” I asked.

“12:01 am” was the reply(!). So, at least SOME cities never sleep, but I’ll be on vacation and won’t be in desperate immediate need of a new laptop at precisely that moment, so I’ll wander in probably a bit BEFORE midnight on the evening of 11/7. Of course the absence of sales tax in Montana will drive my purchase location choice as well, but it looks as though I’ll opt for smaller screen real estate.

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I think it took longer to read the article than to view Apple’s presentation!

There’s a typo in the Color section. You refer to the 14" MacBook Air rather than the bottom-end M3 MacBookPro.

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The low-end 14” plain M3 only has 2 TB/USB-C ports. They all also have HDMI ports and SD card slots, too.

I’ve not needed an HDMI port since retiring in 2019 (just about the time I bought my 2019 Intel 16 - incher). However, last month a dozen of my closest med school buddies and I assembled on Cape Cod for a 50th reunion that included migratory bird watching expeditions, cycling on the Cape Cod bike trail, crab and lobster feasts, and also “what have you been doing for the past 50 years” presentations.

Most other attendees were happy to send bundles of JPEGs to one of us who assembled them into .PPT files on his Windows laptop, but of course I eschewed that MS crud for a Keynote presentation from my Mac crafted with background transitions, photo and movie fades, etc. (the guy wrangling the JPEGS for everybody else also brought a Dell LCD projector that was equipped with HDMI input. Only one problem: I forgot my TB3/USBc<->HDMI adapter! So, after managing to wend my way through the impossible 17th-18th century maze of horsecars paths surrounding Logan Airport that Boston calls “streets,” I wasted time making my way into and out of Boston’s “big dig” tunnel—originally meant to expedite vehicular traffic—only to creep along at 0-2 mph for probably an hour or two before getting to my chosen Apple Retail Store (THANK YOU, Siri, iOS 16, and Apple Maps for helping me survive that) just to get an adapter.
However, for some reason an incompatibility between my laptop and the projector meant that when I launched Keynote in Ventura, the image from his projector blinked on and off incessantly, and even my “massive” 16" laptop screen didn’t suffice for me to tell my story to the audience.

The alternative was to convert my Keynote file to PPT (sacrificing a bunch of the video goodies in the process) the next day, then presenting it from the coordinator’s Windows laptop . Only problem with THAT was that my file was almost 1.5 GB in size, and his Windows laptop was equipped only with USB-A ports of some prior generation bereft of bandwidth.

I reminded my impatient buddies of the current market capitalizations of Dell and Apple, and also of Michael Dell’s “futurist” creds back when Steve Jobs was on “sabbatical” to NeXT. Mr. Dell had been asked what he’d recommend as a solution to Apple’s then serious financial and mission problems; his response had been something akin to "sell the office furniture, pay off the debts (of course, even then, Apple HAD none) and return whatever cash is left to the shareholders!

Actually, I have NO idea whether having a native HDMI port on my laptop would have prevented that embarrassing delay in my presentation, but it DID bring back memories.

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Apple “Scary Fast” Event Scheduled for 30 October 2023
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Probably, but I didn’t talk nearly as fast and included nit-picky little details. It certainly took me a lot longer to write! :slight_smile:

Fixed, thanks! I hope that’s the only mistake—it’s really tricky to write out all these product names repeatedly.

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One other thing to note is the pace of change here, M1 - M2 - M3 in as many years and while M2 was more of a boost and M3 a bigger step, it’s still a lot of change in a short period of time. How that might affect buyers, I wonder if they should have skipped the M2 and kept with the M1 for another year and then done this big step. Might have reduced confusion and FOMO, there’s a lot of overlap, I suspect that’s another reason we keep getting Intel comparisons. Which is better, an M1 Max or an M2 Pro?

Or are we heading into an approach more akin to the phone, where the major jumps are seen between multi-year model numbers, the 11 to the 15 for example and the incremental updates are less significant.

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I’ve been trying to Navigate Apple’s “buy now” configurator for the 14" MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro processor. As best I can tell, it’s not possible to select the base model but upgrade JUST the storage from 512 GB to 1 TB. Is that what others see?

Also, the charging block is more robust on the $2399 model (so differences include additional 1 additional CPU and 4 additional GPU cores, twice the storage, and the beefier charger for a $400 price difference. One curiosity is that “fast charging” is listed only for the M3Max models, but “fast charging” is also available on an m2 MacBook Air. What’s THAT all about?

I haven’t figured out how to configure even more RAM or storage. They’re listed as options but without price quotation. The way I understand “Apple Silicon,” each of these means a different SIC. Is that the case?

One more question: in the past, what I’ve done in my family Apple ecosystem is pass down my retiring device to a family member, but I’m thinking that the benefit of that, at least for my children, might be short lived, because for a techie needing to keep OS and apps updated even the most recent Apple laptop will see its utility and financial value drop off a precipice within one or two more OS revisions, and the computer is still worth >$500 as a trade in now. Any suggestions as regards HOW to manage that so far as the actual OS/data installation transfer from one machine to the other is concerned? My options would include computer to computer (delaying a bit the effect of my trade in) or integrating the data from either an external rotating platter Time Machine or SSD SuperDuper! clone backup in Sonoma from the Intel installation to the new machine.

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I agree, and I think M2 was delayed, probably due to the pandemic, which resulted in the M2 MacBook Pros coming out in the same year as the M3 MacBook Pros.

Given the iPhone example, it seems like Apple can keep this pace of chip evolution going, but it’s weirder in the Mac world, where people want to compare the chips because they’re the main differences between models. (In the iPhone world, I’d argue that the camera is the main difference, or industrial design if there’s a big change.)

Maybe we just have to get used to not having the latest M-series chip and it not mattering.

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[TLDR summary]: Am I the only one who feels his current computer is as fast and as capable as he can imagine ever needing?

[Colorful elaboration]: In the past, each successive Mac I’ve purchased (my first was an SE/30) has scratched an “it could be better” itch, either in making me wait less time for it to complete a task, or in the size of task it could take on. But over time, the “itches” started getting less intense. Then I got a MBP M1 Pro in '21, and I’ve stopped itching entirely. I never wait for it to perform a task; everything happens (nearly) instantly. I don’t have any tasks that are “too big” for it to tackle. For me, it is “fast enough.”

Now, my needs certainly don’t include editing multiple streams of 8K video, or training an AI model, or anything requiring massive computer muscle. But I think the needs I do have are those of the majority of computer users. The performance gains of the subsequent Mx family of chips is impressive from an engineering perspective, but for me they provide no motivation to buy a new Mac equipped with one. I liken it to buying a car with a bigger engine. So what if it will top out at 200mph, where my current one will “only” do 160. I can’t drive either car at its top speed anywhere, so the improvement is meaningless.

Maybe some must-have killer app will be developed in the future that will require the horsepower of the M3 chip and beyond. But I just don’t see why anyone with a typical computer workload would consider getting one now, especially if you already have something with a M1 chip in it.

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Well, that’s interesting. Apple changed the director’s quote in the behind-the-scenes article from:

“We were able to get the same complex shots with iPhone 15 Pro Max,” says Oakes. “It’s amazing to see that the quality from a device that is so small and so portable can rival a large $20,000 camera.”

to

“We were able to get the same complex shots with iPhone 15 Pro Max,” says Oakes. “Everything is there to be an extension of someone’s vision or personality. The image quality of iPhone definitely democratizes the access.”

I wonder who squawked such that Apple felt the need to make the change?

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I’ve read since that Apple compared to Intel and M1 in the presentation because they believe that almost all upgraders will be coming from one of those platforms; they don’t expect anybody with an M2 to be upgrading.

The web site section on the M3 does compare to both the M1 and M2, though. If you look at the MacBook Pro page, scroll down a bit to the “three giant leaps”, there should be a button at the bottom to “Go deeper on the M3 chips”. There they compare performance to MBP models with Intel, M1, and M2.

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I think the reason is more that people generally wait several years before upgrading their Macs. I had my last one for 7 years. I don’t think I’ve every expected to keep current with new CPUs when buying a computer. My expectation is that it’s one of the best/fastest CPUs when I buy the computer, but it will then be eclipsed by at least two and probably more before I buy my next one. And there was a time when we used to expect yearly CPU updates for Macs (and PCs). So I’m not sure that the fast pace of iteration with the M-series chips will make people less likely to buy them. It feels like a return to the days before the stagnation which set in in the latter Intel years.

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The Geekbench results are beginning to trickle out and seem to confirm Apple’s claim of a 15% improvement of the M3 over the M2 and a 25% improvement over the M1.

The odd chip is the M3 Pro with 6 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. That is 2 fewer performance cores than the M1 and M2 Pros. Even though the M3 efficiency cores are faster (due to an increased clock speed, I believe) the ultimate multicore performance might not be as good. This doesn’t bother me as most of the cpu intensive things I do use one thread. (Except for Xcode). It is hard to imagine why they would need so many (efficiency) cores for background housekeeping tasks.

I was thinking of upgrading my M1 Pro 16" with 16 GB of RAM to one of the M3s since the RAM is getting tight and I am seeing some yellow in Memory Pressure. If I replace it with a Max, the economics don’t make sense as I would get modest performance improvement for a great deal of increased cost. So, I’ll keep my machine and be careful of memory usage (impossible when using the iOS simulator which pegs the ram usage).

By the way, it seems that most of the improved performance in the M1->M2->M3 is due to increased clock speeds, something which is the chief benefit of a RISC machine: a simpler instruction set which allows higher clock speeds. The M3 runs at 4 GHz.

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I’m still using my 15" 2017 MBP. My demands on my Mac are pretty modest, and honestly that 2017 model still performs well enough for me. But, I’ve gritted my teeth for enough years with the butterfly keyboard, and Tech Tool Pro warns me it’s about time for a second replacement battery. Also – it won’t run Sonoma, and so begins its gradual slide into obsolescence. With all that in mind, the M3 announcement is what I was waiting for as an excuse to upgrade.

My only hesitation was which way to go from my 15" – 14 or 16? The difference in price made that decision for me, and that difference was significant enough that I didn’t even go to the Apple Store to have a look in person. I hope I don’t regret it, because I live walking distance from an Apple Store and have no excuse!

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Don’t forget they have a 14 day return policy :slight_smile: FWIW I went from a 2015 15" MBP to a 14" M1 and have never regretted the decision.

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Well given no USB-C accessories, I think it likely we’ll see them in late Jan/ Feb 2024 when new M3/M3 Pro Mac Mini’s are almost a necessity to arrive (given it’ll have been a year since previous release.)

Likely the Studios (and Mac Pro) will get their new chips in June at WWDC.
While this is enough time (12 months) since the previous M2 variants were released, I still think it’s looking more and more odd to buyers seeing machines on previous chips for over six months, when everyone knows the next variants are out and about on other Macs.

So the question now is whether Apple is going to change this, and get the Studios/Pros on the new ones quicker?

Somehow the pessimist in me thinks they won’t, unfortunately.

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