After spending a decade with MacBooks I stopped undestanding Apple’s strategy. I completely forgot about Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event, but, being a geek doesn’t help to stop my brain from gearing up and trying to quantify the reason why Apple released an M3 Macbook this year. The obvious opinion would be that they want to add it to this year’s Mac sales and plan to sell some Vision Pros in the next fiscal year, but other than that I don’t see a reason why they would release a refresh to M2 Pro MacBooks that are not even years old. Comparing the new SoCs with prior models doesn’t help, because only M3 Max is getting a boost with 12 performance cores vs 8 on M2 Max and M1 Max and ‘Up to’ 40-core GPU vs ‘up-to’ 38-core GPU in M2 Max. While M3 Pro now has only 6 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, compared to M2 and M1 with 8 performance cores. M2 has 4 efficiency cores, and M1 with 2 efficiency cores, but the battery life is still the same. Memory bandwidth is 150GB/s for M3 Pro vs 200GB/s for M2 and M1 Pro. So, M3 Pro is slower than M2 Pro and M1 Pro. Also, M3 is getting hardware ray tracing and AV1 codec support for M3 Pro and M3 Max.

Making a wild guess here - Apple needed ray tracing and AV1 support in a MacBook Pro this year for gaming and creators. But, why would they add new SoC only to the Macbook Pros? Maybe because they are the only models that sell?

I used an M1 Max and M2 Max 14-inch MacBook with 32Gb RAM and 1TB SSDs and didn’t notice a difference in performance but was pushing them with 80-90% memory utilization and 60-70% CPU usage daily.

Overall, if you don’t plan gaming on your MacBook, get an M2 Pro / M2 Max MacBook and wait for the M5 to make a significant change.