On Halloween, Apple made a “Scary Fast” announcement introducing the new MacBook Pro lineup, which features their all-new series of M3 chips: M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. Since Apple took their chip-making in-house, the world’s largest company has been turning out advanced-level products like crazy! With this latest announcement, Apple introduced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, a more usable and workable size than the previous 13-inch standard “Small” Pro laptop, and a beefed-up 16-inch MacBook Pro. Both sizes come with next-generation Graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture and a faster Central Processing unit (CPU), which, when coupled with the M3 chips, offers up an extremely (scary) fast powerhouse machine.
In addition to all the internal guts of the machines, the MacBook Pro models also all feature a Liquid Retina XDR display with 20 percent brighter SDR content, a built-in 1080p front-facing camera, a six-speaker sound system, AND, most importantly, Apple has brought back all the OG ports that made the MacBook the go-to laptop. It’s such a delight to have them back that we can almost forgive them for trying to be cute and removing all the ports for aesthetic reasons. The MacBooks have up to 22 hours of battery life, but we’ve managed to blow through that in about an hour and a half playing Balders Gate 3, considering the game is visually complex, is played online, and the MacBook is throwing all it’s processing power at it, that’s not that bad. Also, let’s be real here: an hour and a half of gameplay not plugged in on a laptop is enough! Where are you if you’re not plugged into a power source? Probably not at home, so stop playing games on the bus. That’s what iPhones are for.
The charm of the new MacBooks lies in the M3 line of Apple-made chips, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. They are made using 3-nanometer technology, which Apple says they’re faster and a more efficient next-generation GPU. Featuring a technology called Dynamic Caching, the GPU uses the local memory in the hardware in real-time, so only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. No waste. This increases GPU utilization and performance for the more demanding pro apps and games. That’s probably where all that Balder’s Gate 3 battery life is going! While it’s hard to say if this is what’s happening, the computer is fast. We’re using the MacBook Pro M3 Max, and it’s lightning-fast. Between photo-editing, online shopping, and some game playing, the computer is a variable beast of efficiency.
Finally, the new Space Black finish is undoubtedly the cleanest new feature in the MacBook Pro line. It is a lovely black that features an anodization seal to reduce fingerprints significantly, and it really does. The previous MacBook Pro came in black, which was like a fingerprint magnet and was so hard to keep clean. So, while this isn’t necessarily the most significant selling feature, it’s still a nice feature.
The new MacBook Pro line is available now with Canadian pricing as follows: the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 starts at $2,099 (CAD); the 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro starts at $2,699 (CAD), and the 16‑inch MacBook Pro starts at $3,299 (CAD).