The M3 Max-powered MacBook Pro is easily the most powerful laptop Apple has ever produced, though I don’t see gaming on a Mac taking off just yet.
Note: this is still a review in progress, so we’re giving it our 4/5 rating, and we’ll be coming back to share how well the battery and screen brightness holds up. Check back with us in the coming days for the full score.
There are few things in tech writing that feel as good as booting up a powerful computer. It’s as close as people in my line of work can get to flipping the switch to fire up a two-stage sub-orbital rocket engine.
When you boot up the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new M3 Max chip running 48 GB of RAM, it’s like sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise. It boots and runs like a dream. Possibilities buzz with electricity around your fingertips as you move to start using it. Yes, the MacBook Pro is still good. Yes, the M3 is the best version of the MacBook Pro. And yes, Bruce, it does come in black.
But, like in rocket design, knowing how powerful your engine is doesn’t matter as much as what you’re going to use it for. I know the MacBook Pro is a powerful beast, but stick it in High Power mode, and the fans start going so fast they sound like they’re about to generate lift, drawing a concerned look from my roommate sitting in the room near me. It also drains the laptop’s battery from full to null in just about two hours if you leave it unplugged.
This is a powerful and expensive laptop meant for productivity tasks that require a lot of GPU power and memory, but it’s a little overkill for much below that. It can also support a fair amount of gaming potential, though it remains limited by a lack of Mac-supporting games.
Apple’s latest MacBook Pro now uses Apple’s most powerful M-series chip. The M3 Max is the most capable of the bunch.
Apple’s latest MacBook Pro now uses Apple’s most powerful M-series chip. The M3 Max is the most capable of the bunch.
Apple declared its newest M3-powered products were “scary fast” during an event bearing the same name. They are, indeed, powerful machines, and all the benchmarks we were able to run prove that. Yet the MacBook Pro is most comfortable when it’s running like it always has, for intensive tasks that allow users a fair bit of wiggle room so you’re not overtaxing your device. It can effectively power some heavy-duty rendering programs with ease. The M3 is, indeed, a more powerful chip than the M2. But depending on the user, that might not change much—or anything—about how you use Apple’s laptops sporting the company’s own silicon.
In my first impressions of the Pro last month, I thought Apple was aiming this machine for the market of MacBook users who haven’t made the switch away from Intel chips. I would modify that now. Apple is also trying to promote its latest ultra-powered laptop as a quality workstation as well as a gaming PC. This is Apple’s burgeoning use case for Mac. The problem is the Mac ecosystem still lacks the support of the most major game makers. It’s pure disappointment to scroll through my entire Steam library to find only a handful of games, most of them a few years old, that don’t have a dreaded “Available for Windows” sticker on them.
Most of the same critiques we had with the M2-powered MacBook Pro, which came out earlier this year, remain the same. The camera notch is still annoying. There’s still no touchscreen or many overt display improvements over past generations. Simply put, it’s an iteration of what already worked for the M1-powered MacBook, but is that enough to sell current MacBook users a whole new laptop generation? Considering that this is the second all-new MacBook Pro model released this year, I hope Apple takes far more time to innovate on the next laptop model.
