M3 Max MacBook Pro :
So there are two novelties in this new Apple laptop, the new color and the new chip.
Everything that was already great outside of Apple’s laptop redesign, is still great, it still has a bunch of ports, the full-size HDMI, the MagSafe is still there, still has the high-quality construction, the square design, the super bright screen.
Plus, everything that was annoying about it still is, still has that nice big notch at the top, with just a webcam and no face unlock.
As if the color is literally called Space Black, isn’t it?
So I’m expecting a really, really black laptop, and in the commercial it looks great, they’re talking about this new sophisticated anodizing process for aluminum, so it’s not a coating, it’s a new chemical process, which is part of the anodizing itself.
It’s supposed to be extra fingerprint resistant, but now that we have it here, actually, I mean, it’s darker, but it’s just a little darker than the other Space Grays from before.
If you want to see a black laptop, it’s a black laptop, as they already make black laptops.
So, Apple is right there, it’s a darker gray, I think it’s basically the darkest Apple, can get without showing a ton of fingerprints.
I mean, it still shows some fingerprints, it’s definitely not completely immune.
But compared to other black laptops, which I’ve tried, it’s better than those, so it’s somewhere in the middle of not so many fingerprints, but also darker than normal, it’s darker, which is good.
Like some camera angles, it hits it really looks dark, but you get the idea.
In addition, if you are curious, it also comes with black apple stickers, and it also comes with a black MagSafe charging cable, but also, this braided cable is darker than the end,
and it also comes with a still white brick.
So I would not say that they have yet fully committed to the theme of Space Noir, I will give them partial credit.
But then let’s talk about the chip inside, thus, the new three-nanometer M3 chip family is announced, and it offers nice improvements compared to the M2 family, definitely.
It’s almost weird to compare it to the M2 stuff, because hardly anyone with an M2, should switch to that, but at least it’s a good frame of reference.
So I tested the absolute most high-end M3 Max, in this laptop, which from the M2 Max goes from a 38-core GPU, to a 40-core GPU.
And from 96 GB of shared memory to now up to 128 GB, from the point of view of the processor, Apple’s assertions were pretty much correct.
Somewhere in the range of improvement of 20 sometimes 30% compared to last year, which is very respectable.
And in fact, it’s a bigger jump in the performance of the single core, than I expected, which is great for everyday use, fast and everyday computing, navigation-type stuff, and then as far as the GPU is concerned, that’s where more people were hoping for a little more improvement.
And again, this is a respectable bump, not quite going beyond the big discrete GPUs, but still putting the GPU of M3 Max, at the level of M1 Ultra, so it’s quite impressive.
And corresponding somewhere around AMD Radeon RX 6800 on the benchmarks, or on an RTX 3070, which is you know we’re talking about a fairly mid-range card at this point.
But that’s the thing with all this new GPU performance, and the benchmarks and everything that’s great, but what’s actually more interesting, at least for me, is what you’re actually going to do with this extra performance, this extra graphics power.
And for a laptop like this, it’s usually about powerful graphics games or applications, so yeah, when you see this new powerful GPU in a laptop, with new hardware-accelerated ray tracing, for the first time on a Mac, and mesh shading and all that, probably the first thing you think about is gaming, but then you realize it’s a Mac.
So probably no game, but really, I think the reason, at least in my head, why most people don’t associate games with Macs is not because they are not powerful.
I mean, they’re not as powerful as the most powerful GPUs in the industry, but they’re not bad, it’s just because the games that people play, and that they’re passionate about, are often not available on Mac.
Like, I’m not even a big PC gamer, but you already know, if you want to play “The Witcher”, the new “Fallout”, “Skyrim”, “Crysis”, “Apex Legends”, there is a long list, and if you want to use maximum GPU power to this game to play it with the best possible quality, you are looking to optimize a PC, not buy a Mac.
But I think that the game on Mac, is in an interesting place of all time right now, because again, many games are not available on Mac, but this is the most powerful Mac ever designed, and I played with some of the games that Apple likes to show, like in the App Store.
“I played this game called “P’s Lies.” It’s one of the ones they talked about, in the keynote and it takes advantage of hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
You can see it in the reflections, and on the floor and in the sword and everything, it plays amazing.
The frame rates remain high, I play in 4K resolution, there is a visual depth, and details that are magnificent.
In addition, macOS Sonoma has game mode, which allocates as much power as possible to this game, it also allows you to use a Bluetooth controller, with much faster sampling, and lower latency, and therefore simply maximize everything works very well.
It’s a great gaming experience, I was very impressed, I don’t care about this game, I’m not invested in this particular game at all.
It was fun to play the demo, and I was impressed by the actual moment of IT, it would be a little hot, and the fans would be spinning, but the fact that it would work on these Mac settings is amazing.
I just don’t, I’m not invested in this game at all, and I think that kind of sums up how I feel about all this extra GPU power, it’s like, you could use it for gaming, but if you’re going to buy a computer for that much money to play, you’re not buying a Mac.
But again, of course, it’s a Business laptop, it’s a MacBook Pro, and so there are a lot of other non-games, which take advantage of this extra GPU power and this new hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and mesh shading and all that.
Things like Cinema 4D, and this laptop with this chip are better than ever at all of this too, and I think we’re slowly going to start seeing even more applications on the Mac, taking advantage of this stuff over time.
I bought a new MacBook Pro M3 Max in matte black, but now that I’ve had this review unit, done my testing and experienced it, the color is pretty nice, but it’s not as impressive and new as I might have hoped.
And then the new chip, it’s great and all, but it’s not really going to make a significant difference in my workflow.
Now with the 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max, it turns out that it’s not for me, I mean, I guess it’s a high-end matte black laptop, so maybe it’s a little bit for me.
But I think the point that I’m trying to make, is that if you already have a family smart MacBook, in the level that you want, which means that if you have an M2 Pro or an M1 Pro, M3 Pro will not be the huge difference for you.
If you have M2 Max or M1 Max, M3 Max is not really for you, it’s like any other spec bump a lot more, for people with older machines, you didn’t need to hear me say that, but it’s true for people with older machines, with Intel machines or with machines of a different level, where it would really open up something new in their workflow.
And that’s the great thing about them, is that you’re going to have a better machine than ever.
Conclusion :
For me, I’m going to keep using M1 Max, it’s a testament to how good this thing is, maybe I’ll do a review two years later, three years later or something like that.
Still a great laptop, still great screens, amazing speakers, awesome build quality, battery life is still impressive.
But maybe my upgrade will come when they really commit to matte black, or there will be another huge upgrade somewhere down the line.
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