Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event has just revealed that the company will soon launch 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 not adding any M3 goodness, Apple has now given us what we’ve been waiting for: the M3 chip and a trio of new products that feature it. The most powerful of the bunch is the new model of Apple’s largest laptop, the MacBook Pro 16-inch – which is actually will not are equipped with the standard M3 chip, but rather with the more powerful Pro and Max variants. However, the smaller MacBook Pro 14-inch will be available with all three new chips.
The M3 series chips, the world’s first mainstream laptop processor manufactured using a 3nm manufacturing process, are expected to offer a significant leap in generational performance – something that could upset recent buyers of the 2023 M2 MacBook Pro models.
The MacBook Pro 16-inch will also feature Apple’s Liquid Retina The M3 Pro and M3 Max versions also come in a new ‘Space Black’ color scheme.
Apple MacBook Pro 16 inches with M3: at a glance
- M3-powered MacBook Pros can be pre-ordered
- Official release on November 7
- More power than current generation MacBook Pros
Apple MacBook Pro 16 inches with M3: release date
Apple has immediately opened pre-orders for the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3, meaning you can head to Apple’s website and pre-order yours right away. Buyers should receive their new laptops around November 7, when the new M3 products will be available at retailers.
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: price and availability
We haven’t gotten the full price breakdown for the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 yet, but we do know that Apple’s latest large-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 inches, so it’s possible probably expect prices for more powerful configurations to roughly match those you can buy 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 obviously cost extra, but we’d be surprised if these see a price increase compared to the current generation of MacBooks.
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3: specifications and performance
Apple generally hasn’t given us much information about the performance of the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, but we did get some internal testing stats.
The M3 Pro model is said to be 30 to 40 percent faster at image editing, scientific sequencing and text-based editing tasks 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 very useful comparison since 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 against the current generation M2 Pro and M2 Max models.
We’ll come back here to update this page once Apple releases more detailed spec sheets, which should give us a better idea of how these new laptops will compare to Apple’s current MacBook offerings.