Review | M3 Max MacBook Pro review: world-beating laptop gets even better, with more processing power than 2022’s Apple M2 Max and superior speakers
- The latest M3 Max MacBook Pro is a stunning laptop that’s head and shoulders above its opposition – Apple’s own M2 Max MacBook Pro from 2022
- The M2 Max was a world beater, but the M3 Max boasts a processor and graphics even more powerful. Quite simply, it beats any other laptop – and many PCs
Barely a year after the launch of the M2 Max MacBook Pro, which surpassed rival laptops in power and efficiency, Apple is back with an updated version, the M3 Max, launched alongside machines with lower-tier M3 and M3 Pro chips.
It’s an unusual move for the US tech giant, whose products usually have a longer life cycle than just 10 months, but nonetheless the M2 Max is old news. The M3 Max brings a new 3-nanometre silicon architecture and four more performance cores (a total of 12) over its predecessor.
The M3 Max MacBook Pro comes with either a 14-inch or 16-inch display. This review is of the larger size that has highest-tier configuration, with 128GB of unified memory.
Design and hardware
The chassis of this 16-inch MacBook Pro is identical to the 16-inch M1 Max and M2 Max: an aluminium unibody design with a sturdy hinge, lots of ports, and a gorgeous 16.2-inch display using Micro-LED technology that sits somewhere below OLED but above LCD in display quality.
The laptop is still quite thick and heavy, measuring 16.6mm (0.65 inches) and weighing 2.1kg (4.6 pounds), but that is understandable considering the power it’s packing. The six-speaker system is still the best I’ve heard from any portable device that isn’t a premium dedicated wireless speaker.
The port selections include three USB-C Thunderbolt ports, all of which can fit a charging cable for the 99Wh battery or pump the display out to multiple external monitors; a headphone jack; a MagSafe charging port; HDMI slot; and SD card reader.
The star of the show is, of course, the new brain: the M3 Max silicon. The chip reaches a maximum of 16 cores instead of 12, and includes a GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, a 3D graphics technique that improves graphical performance.
