Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: everything we know so far
Read up on all the developments from the Apple Scary Fast event as it happened.
Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event has just revealed that the company will shortly be launching a new MacBook Pro 16-inch – now equipped with the powerful new Apple M3 Pro and M3 Max chips.
Although WWDC 2023 let us down by failing to include any M3 goodness, Apple has now given us what we’ve been waiting for: the M3 chip, and a trio of new products featuring it. The most powerful of the bunch is the new model of Apple’s largest laptop, the MacBook Pro 16-inch – which actually won’t feature the standard M3 chip, but rather its more powerful Pro and Max variants. The smaller MacBook Pro 14-inch will be available with all three new chips, however.
The world’s first mainstream laptop processor manufactured on a 3nm fabrication process, the M3 series chips are expected to offer a significant jump in generational performance – something that might upset recent buyers of the 2023 M2 MacBook Pro models.
The MacBook Pro 16-inch will also feature Apple’s Liquid Retina XDR display and will support more unified memory, with the M3 Max version capable of being configured all the way up to a beefy 128GB of RAM. The M3 Pro and M3 Max versions will come in a new ‘Space Black’ colorway, too.
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: at a glance
M3-powered MacBook Pros available to pre-order Official release on November 7 Greater power than current-gen MacBook Pros
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: release date
Apple has opened pre-orders for the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 straight away, meaning you can go to the Apple website and reserve yours straight away. Buyers should receive their new laptops around November 7, which is when the new M3 products will be available at retailers.
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: price and availability
(Image credit: Apple)
We haven’t yet received the full price breakdown for the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3, but we do know that Apple’s newest big-screen laptop will start at $2,499 for the base M3 Pro configuration.
That’s the same price as the existing M2 Pro version of the MacBook Pro 16-inch, so we can probably expect pricing on more powerful configurations to roughly mirror those you can buy right now, although the ceiling will likely be higher due to the new, larger maximum RAM support.
Other extras like a larger SSD or Apple’s software bundles will naturally cost extra, but we’d be surprised if those see a price increase compared to current-gen MacBooks.
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: Specs and performance
Apple has – typically – not given us a huge amount of information regarding the performance of the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, but we did get some internal testing stats.
The M3 Pro model is stated to be 30 to 40 percent faster in image editing, scientific sequencing, and text-based editing workloads than the fastest M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16-inch. Meanwhile, the M3 Max version of the laptop is 2.5x faster than the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M1 Max in rendering tasks.
Apple also compared the new M3-equipped laptops to older MacBook Pro models with Intel CPUs, but that’s not a vastly useful comparison given that those laptops are now more than three years old. We’ll have to wait until we can properly review the new MacBooks to compare their performance with the current-gen M2 Pro and M2 Max models.
We’ll be back here to update this page as soon as Apple releases more detailed spec sheets, which should give us a better idea of how these new laptops will stack up against Apple’s current MacBook offerings.
