I published my review of the M3 Max MacBook Pro earlier this week, and suffice to say I was pretty impressed. I love the Space Black colour, and the GPU performance in particular blew me away.
But one configuration of the new MacBook Pro flew a little under the radar – the M3 Pro model. Apple didn’t want to send this one out to reviewers, and instead went with its much stronger M3 Max. And whereas in the M2 generation the M3 Max and Pro were a little closer in performance, this time around there seems to be more of a gap.
There are two eyebrow-raising specs on the M3 Pro. Firstly, the number of cores has been changed, reconfiguring what the M2 Pro used. This time around, the 12-core M3 Pro has six performance and six efficiency cores, whereas the M2 Pro had eight performance and four efficiency cores. It also has a reduced memory bandwidth, down from 200GB per second to 150GB per second. Meanwhile, Apple has started selling the base configuration with 8GB instead of 16GB of RAM, which has caused its own minor backlash. None of this sounds good, but in the end it’s the performance that counts.
The first performance leak was some early Geekbench scores that came out last weekend, and they showed some very disappointing results. They showed a single-core score of 3,035 and a multi-core score of 15,173, which YouTuber Vadim Yuryev notes is practically equivalent to the performance of the M2 Max. Compared to my own MacBook Pro’s results, that’s 28% slower than the M3 Max.
Of course, this doesn’t take into account the graphics, where the M3 generation’s biggest gains have been made. So I think you’d still see an improvement going from the M2 Max to the M3 Pro. But it’s still not a good look.
One of the first in-depth reviews of the M3 Pro came out on Thursday from Ars Technica and confirmed many of the initial concerns. The M3 Pro is clearly an improvement on the M2 Pro and M3, but it’s not quite as good as the Max model. Whereas the M2 Pro was almost too overpowered to make sense in the line-up, and even caused some awkward chip positioning in the previous generation, the M3 Pro is a much more modest improvement over the base configuration. This review shows that the M3 Pro is only 13% faster than the M2 Pro (in the Mac mini) for graphics in the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark.
The prices have remained the same. So while the M3 Pro does its job in the range, it seems to be there mainly to push people up to the more expensive M3 Max. If nothing else, it certainly guarantees that Apple will make more money from M3 Pro buyers.
None of this means you should necessarily avoid the M3 Pro MacBook Pro altogether. For some, it may be just enough performance at just the right price. But I think it’s an increasingly small demographic compared to the M3 or M3 Max models.
