Apple M3 Max: everything we know
The Apple M3 Max chip is here after a surprise announcement at the Apple Scary Fast event, and it looks to be one of the most exciting chips Apple has ever produced.
The new M3 Max chip came as a surprise at the event in late October, especially since most of the rumors surrounding the new Apple M3 chip didn’t see the entry-level Apple model being released until 2024 at the earliest, and we definitely expect the Apple M3 Pro and M3 Max to be announced long after the M3 chip made its debut (all three chips were announced on October 30, 2023).
So what do we know about the successor to the Apple M2 Max chip? Quite a lot, as it turns out, so let’s dive in.
Apple M3 Max chip: get to the point
- What is it? The successor to Apple’s M2 Pro chip
- When will it be available? Pre-orders are live now, shipping late November
- How much is it? Won’t sell on its own, but the MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3 Pro starts at $1,999 (about £1,640, AU$2,900) and the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Pro starts at $2,499 (about £2,050, AU$ 3,625).
Apple M3 Max chip: release date
The Apple M3 Max chip will power the new Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch and Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, which went up for pre-order on October 30, 2023, and will be available in 27 countries to start, with more to come even more. later on.
While you can pre-order now, you’ll have to wait about a week before you can actually get your hands on new hardware with the Apple M3 Max chip, as the new MacBook Pro models will ship in late November 2023.
We’re not sure when the MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models with M3 Max will be available at Apple Stores and other retailers like Best Buy, but you can also expect them in late November.
While we expect the Mac Studio to eventually get an M3 Max upgrade, we haven’t heard anything about that at this time, so that’s unknown.
Apple M3 Max chip: price
The Apple M3 Max chip won’t be sold on its own, but will instead power the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. We don’t yet have information on pricing for the new M3 Max MacBook models, but we will update this page once these prices go live.
There’s no word yet on whether the Mac Studio will get the M3 Max, but considering you can get the Mac Studio with M2 Max, we expect that device will eventually be upgraded to the Apple M3 Max chip as well.
Apple M3 Max chip: specs and performance
The new Apple M3 Max has a number of noticeable improvements over the Apple M2 Max.
Firstly, the number of CPU cores received a significant upgrade, with a 16-core CPU featuring 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores compared to the M2 Max’s 12-core CPU. It also supports up to 128 GB of unified memory, 32 GB more than the M2 Max. The larger M3 Max also features an approximately 38% greater number of transistors than the M2 Max (92 billion compared to 67 billion for the M2 Max).
In terms of performance, Apple says the M3 Max will be up to 80% faster than the Apple M1 Max, and while we don’t have battery information yet, Apple says the M3 Max will have a class-leading battery. life for a Pro laptop. Considering the battery performance of the M1 Max and M2 Max we’ve seen so far, this isn’t out of the question at all.
The biggest improvement, however, comes from the massive 40-core GPU, which Apple says will be 50% faster than the M1 Max’s GPU. More importantly, the M3 chips are the first Apple M-series silicon with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading, and something Apple calls Dynamic Caching.
This latest technology allocates memory to GPU-intensive tasks exactly according to process needs, meaning that memory allocation will be much more efficient and will generally get much better performance from memory.
Of course, we’ll have to see how well these technologies work in practice once we get one of the new MacBook Pro models for review, but needless to say, we expect this to be one of the best mobile workstation processors around.