MacBooks Pro with M3 chip announced
Monday, the 30th of October, Apple made an event to announce new MacBooks Pro with the new M3 chip, « Scary Fast ». They told us all the improvements made on this new M3 chip, as well as the one made on the MacBooks Pros. They did not tell anything more apart from the fact that the iMac also receive the new M3 chip.
But one sentence at the end of the event chocked everyone, « the entire video was shot on iPhone, and edited on Mac. ». The only cameras used to shot the video were iPhones, that means everything. Of course there was many other equipment, but no more than the ones used with professional cameras.
I will resume the event for you to get all information without watching the 30 minutes Apple event.
The new M3 Apple chip
After a brief introduction to remind people MacBooks are incredibly fast, Apple announced the new M3 Apple chips. As for the previous Apple chip version, there are 3 M3 chips, the M3, the M3 Pro, and the M3 Max.
GPU
These new M3 chips come with a next generation GPU, with a few features added. The first one is the dynamic cache, it allows the memory used by a graphic task to be adjusted in real time. As a result, more memory will be available for the new GPU tasks.
They also added hardware acceleration for mesh shading and ray tracing, for both modeling and light effects. These features make the video games look way better than without.
This new GPU M3 is 1.8x faster than the previous M2 model.
CPU
Regarding the CPU part of the new M3 chip, Apple also made improvements on both performance cores and efficient cores. The performance cores are 15% faster than on the M2 models, and the efficient cores are 30% faster. Also, the Neural Engine cores are 15% faster than the M2 ones.
With these improvements on cores, Apple increase the overall performance of the M3 without changing the architecture of the chip too much compared to the M2 models. For example, the M3 is 20% than the M2, according to Apple. They also said that the M3 Max is 50% faster than the M2 Max, but they did not made comparison between the Pro models though.
M3 MacBooks Pro are faster
Obviously, as M3 chips are faster than M2 chips, these new MacBooks pro are faster than the previous ones, but also because Apple made improvements on the thermal system.
The announced than the 14 inches MacBook Pro M3 is 40% faster than the M2 one, and that’s the 16 inches MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro chip is 20% faster than the one with the M2 Pro chip.
Wherever you use your MacBook plugged in to the charger, or on battery, the performance will stay the same. MacOS won’t reduce the performance on battery to save some battery life, unless you tell him to do so, by enabled the low power mode.
The 14 inches MacBook pro starts at $1599, while the 16 inches one starts at $2499. There is a huge price difference between both model, it can be explained by the fact that the normal M3 chip, the cheapest one, is only available on the 14 inches model.
The new MacBook Pros with M3 Pro, and M3 Max can be chosen in a new color, the space black. It’s a dark aluminium finish, which also reduce fingerprints.
iMacs get the new M3 chip
After Apple finished to tell all the new stuff regarding the MacBooks Pro M3, they announced that the 24 inches iMac receive the new M3 chip. For a comparison, this new M3 iMac is 2x faster than the M1 iMac, according to Apple.
iMac M3 starts at $1299, and apart from the M3 chip, Apple did not announce anything new.
Maxime Levesque is a technical engineer with more than 5 years of professional experience. He is an expert in computer and phones, mostly on Apple products. Maxime is also the founder of TechBrowser.
