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.
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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.
It’s the most powerful in any portable computer, and rivals all but the most spec’d out desk-bound PCs.
Software and features
This MacBook Pro ships with MacOS Sonoma 14.1, Apple’s latest software. Upgrades include an aesthetic that’s closer to the iPhone’s software, with more rounded corners in windows, and a settings page that includes a “Battery Health” section.
FaceTime video calls offer interactive reactions that can be triggered by hand gestures. Safari, Apple’s web browser, also supports multiple user profiles.
But the biggest benefit of using MacOS is still for loyal Apple users. Everything connects seamlessly, and the ability to record a voice memo on an iPhone or Apple Watch and have that same note show up on a MacBook within seconds is always useful.
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Performance and battery life
Here is where the Apple silicon shone in the past, and the M3 Max continues the trend. In benchmark applications such as Geekbench 6 and CineBench, this 16-inch machine attains scores that are off the charts. It’s particularly impressive that the M3 Max in multi-core benchmarks saw a nearly 60 per cent increase over the M2 Max, which was already a world-beater.
I often edit 4K videos on Final Cut Pro, and nothing I threw at the machine slowed it down. Exporting shorter video clips (under 90 seconds) for social media is virtually instantaneous. For 10-12 minute videos with multiple tracks and colour grading, the export times are roughly half of the total video length.
With Apple chips, it’s not just raw power, but also efficiency. Apple’s ARM-based silicon is a so-called system-on-a-chip (SoC), where all the resources are shared, and it has more synergy than Intel-powered processors. This explains why battery life is usually more than double that of Windows machines with the same battery size, and how performance remains consistent whether the MacBook is being powered or operating on battery.
If you’re doing office-type productivity work like word processing and emails, this laptop can last well over 17 hours. For video editing on Final Cut Pro, a two-hour session drains about 45 per cent, which is amazing. Two hours of editing 4K videos on a Windows laptop running Adobe software would completely drain the battery.
Conclusion
The M3 Max MacBook Pro packs enough CPU and GPU power to handle any video or graphic work for all but the highest level of creative professionals.
The majority of consumers could make do with the standard M3 or M3 Pro chips.
The base 16-inch model starts at US$3,499, with my top-end model priced at US$7,199. Clearly this machine is not for most people.
The M3 Max is Apple flexing – and complete overkill. For most people, the M3 MacBook Pro – heck, the 10-month-old M2 machines – are more than good enough.
