M3 Pro MacBook Pro after 3 Months - Why EVERYONE Was Wrong!

It's been three months since Apple launched their M3 lineup of MacBook chips, and this particular model, the 14-inch M3 Pro, was the most disappointing. But now that we've used it, my mind has really shifted and I'm going to take a different approach to this video compared to the past ones, and take a broader look at what has been happening with Apple's MacBooks and their chips. Now of course we got 3nm which was extremely exciting and there's no other company out there using these kind of chips in here, but when we dug into the fine details, we saw that the M3 Pro has taken many steps back. One big concern was that the memory bandwidth went from 200GB a second down to 150, that's a 25% cut. And then with that, not only did they cut the core count on the CPU, but also on the graphics. And in the grand scheme of things, unlike the M3 chip and the M3 Max, the M3 Pro actually dropped in transistor count which Apple has never done before. Now in my opinion, I thought that Apple was trying to make this MacBook worse, because with the previous generations, a lot of times we would be recommending a 14-inch MacBook because it's a nice sweet spot. Sure, you can get a lot higher performance or you could save a little bit more money, but it was a good machine. And then when we got our hands on it, we started testing, we had a variety of results and the saddest thing was looking at the graphics performance, which was also not that much better than the M1 Pro and M1 Max kind of lineup. Now when Apple launched those machines, those shocked the world. Of course those were the first Pro chips after the M1 launch and they did an incredible job. Not only did we get killer battery life, we got really good performance, the thermals were really good, and after that when a lot of people bought them, there was not much reason to upgrade. And so fast forward to the M3 lineup with these machines, of course we got the brand new color, which I have and it is beautiful, but other than that, not that much changed. Because of that, a lot of people were actually disappointed and the limelight actually went to the regular M3 chip that you could buy for $1,600. And that machine, while it seemed like a killer value, once we actually tested it, I told people not to buy it. There were a lot of limitations there to get the price tag low. And now after three months, I think this machine is the most surprising one and I'll explain to you guys why. Now on the outside, it is almost the same, but that's not a bad thing because the keyboard is fantastic, the trackpad is great, it looks beautiful, the screen is the same, but it's still an amazing display, great camera in a nice compact 14 inch package. But what a lot of people don't talk about or didn't talk about is things like efficiency and battery life. Now in our hardcore benchmark test, we did see a difference in battery performance when we were really pushing it. But now using it and being able to test it, the battery life is roughly 20% better than before. And the 14 inch had pretty good battery life, not as good as the 16, but that is a nice advantage. Now on top of that, when you're using it, because of the three nanometer design, this thing stays very quiet, very cool, practically fanless. So you don't have to worry about heat or anything like that. And that is a nice advantage. But when we started looking into other performance, we did get some nice gains. And a lot of times when you have a channel like us or a lot of other channels, you're looking at year over year performance gains. And yes, we did see some in graphics, for example. We saw some gains in photo editing, that was a nice example for various other tasks. And you're kind of like, well, it's a little underwhelming or wow, this is better. Like for example, for graphics rendering using ray tracing, that was probably the biggest thing that had just absolutely massive difference. But of course, not a lot of people do that kind of thing. There is a subset of people just like there's video editors, you got photo editors, and then you'll have graphics designers. But a lot of times those people will get higher end computers anyways, maybe the max chip because they want to render as fast as possible. But what really blew my mind is when I started comparing this 14 inch to a 16 inch M1 Max, that just came out a couple of years before it. Looking at CPU performance, this 14 inch, which has less CPU cores, less bandwidth than the previous version actually beats out the M1 Max in Geekbench 6. And it's actually close to the M2 Max while using a lot less power. And then looking at photo editing with Lightroom, which uses CPU and graphics, I also couldn't believe that this kind of bottlenecked on purpose machine beats out the M1 Max with its much more powerful graphics as well. So that is right there incredible in just a couple of years. And then of course, looking at the new ray tracing graphics in Blender, it absolutely beats out the M1 Max and in Cinebench's new GPU test, we have the same result. It is actually faster. Now just a couple of years ago, I was buying the 16 inch because I wanted that higher performance. And of course, you could still say the same thing now with the M3 Max, that thing is a beast. But the thing that's changed is that now is $4,000 if you want the highest spec, whereas this thing you can pick up right now for $1,800 on sale. And that's what gets us to this wider perspective of, are we always just looking at chip after chip year over year, or are we looking at a couple of different years comparing what you had to spend $3,500 on at the time, have a thicker machine, much louder, hotter, worse battery life, heavier compared to this that is able to beat it out in a lot of tasks now. And I think that is where it's very impressive. So no, Apple did not just make the M3 Pro worse, get a lower CPU core count, GPU core count, limit bandwidth, just to make you want to upgrade and spend more money. They made it a very nice, very balanced machine. And it turns out that those limitations didn't really matter because it does a killer job at a killer price point. And with that, they also gave it two extra gigs of RAM because of the way the RAM layout was set up. So that's a nice little bonus. And if you're going to dig into swap, the SSD is also faster. They got slower with the M2 Pro series. Now they make it quicker. So that kind of makes up for that a little bit more. So it is really an equivalent of more like a 14 inch M1 Max machine while having a lot of other benefits. So three months later, I think this is an excellent machine for anybody that needs a general MacBook. Small, lightweight, quiet, killer battery life, beautiful display, speakers, keyboard for $1,800. I don't think you can really beat that. And for people that even bought an M1 Max 16 inch, if you want to get something smaller, more compact, you can sell that used, buy this, maybe even make a little bit of money on top just because of the difference. So after three months, this thing is great. And I think a lot of people are overlooking it. Of course, there's killer sales, so you can pick one up if you need a machine. And honestly, I don't know what, how much more you actually need or what to really ask from it. Of course, there's a lot of crazy ideas you can say to pack in. It's not really realistic. I think the only real negative that we have found with this machine is just that for video editing, if you're exporting, you don't get any speed benefit compared to the older Pro Apple Silicon chips. They're using the same encoding engine. So if you're upgrading from before, you're not going to see a difference, actually the same speed as like an M1 for encoding. That's the only thing I would want in an M4 Pro chip. Other than that, it's an excellent value, great machine, and I would really highly recommend it. It's such a good balance product. But you guys let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below. I'll leave a link where you guys can get a great deal. Click that circle above to subscribe. Check out one of those videos right over there. This has been Max, and I'll see you in the next one.