The new MacBook Pro now comes with the M3 family of chips and can be had in black
Apple has just announced its new M3 family of chips and with that comes new Macs. And specifically, updated 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
One of the big news is that the 14-inch MacBook Pro can now be had with the base chip. In this case, the M3 chip. This brings the starting price down significantly from S$2,899 to S$2,299.Prices of the other models with M3 Pro and M3 Max are unchanged.
In terms of design and features, nothing much has changed. Screen sizes are the same and you still get the very excellent Liquid Retina XDR display. Dimensions are identical too, as is weight,and all the ports are unchanged.
The only notable change is that there's now a Space Black finish. However, that's exclusive to the models with at least an M2 Pro chip.
As I mentioned, the 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts with the M3 chip. This is the first time a 14-inch MacBook Pro can be ordered with the base chip. This means users will be able to get all the benefits of Apple's best MacBooks, such as the excellent display and connectivity, but at a lower price.
It might be the base chip but Apple is touting respectable performance gains of up to 20% faster CPU performance and up to 20% faster GPU performance than the M2 chip.
And for very power-hungry users, these new notebooks will support up to 128GB of unified memory when spec'ed with the M3 Max chip.
You can read more about the new M3 family of chips in our separate article here. But to put it briefly, Apple is mostly focusing on the GPU this time, with new features such as Dynamic Caching and support for mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Based on first impressions, it looks like Apple has gone and made its best notebooks even better. It's more powerful,it retains all the features that we love, and the pricing doesn't seem to have changed much. And also, there's now the ability to get it with the base chip at a lower price.
Now, while theability to get the 14-inch MacBook Pro at a lower starting price is very enticing, there's a major drawback. It comes with some compromises as the entry-level M3 14-inch MacBook Pro only comes with 8GB of memory, which is probably a bit underwhelming for what is supposedly a "Pro" machine. You could spec more memory but that would bump the price up significantly. Anyway, we'll delve into this topic deeper in our full review, so stay tuned.
Pricing and availability
The new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros will be available to order starting 1 November 2023 and will be available in stores on 7 November 2023.
Prices of the 14-inch MacBook Pro startat S$2,299 while prices of the 16-inch MacBook Pro start at S$3,599.
You can find the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros on the Apple Online Store.
Here's a handy table showing all the available off-the-shelf configurations of the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
| Chip | M3(8 CPU, 10 GPU) | M3(8 CPU, 10 GPU) | M3 Pro(11CPU, 14GPU) | M3 Pro(12CPU, 18GPU) | M3 Max(14CPU, 30 GPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memory | 8GB | 8GB | 18GB | 18GB | 36GB |
| Storage | 512GB | 1TB | 512GB | 1TB | 1TB |
| Price | S$2,299 | S$2,599 | S$2,899 | S$3,499 | S$4,699 |
| Chip | M3 Pro(12CPU, 18GPU) | M3 Pro(12CPU, 18GPU) | M3 Max(14CPU, 30 GPU) | M3 Max(16CPU, 40 GPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memory | 18GB | 36GB | 36GB | 48GB |
| Storage | 512GB | 512GB | 1TB | 1TB |
| Price | S$3,599 | S$4,199 | S$5,099 | S$5,849 |
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