M3 MacBook Pro Buying Guide – M3, M3 Pro, or M3 Max?

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Heads-up – this is going to be an expensive purchase for you. Sorry – I cannot sugarcoat your MacBook Pro buying experience.

I say this from my own experience, having pre-ordered my Space Black 14-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro, whose price sailed well beyond £4,000 before I hit the ‘checkout’ button.

Four grand. For a laptop. I’d forgotten how expensive MacBook Pros are.

The good news is, they last for ages, and the M3 generation is the fastest and most capable ever. Those who know far more about chip design than I do are already claiming that these new MacBook Pros are going to remain relevant for an awfully long time.

That begs the question: how much money should you spend on yours?

M3 MacBook Pro Pricing

This is where things get rather eye-watering, granted – but it’s also where you’ve got to be the most careful because the entire MacBook Pro configuration process is built to make you spend as much money as possible.

To give you a helping hand, we’ve put together a simple guide to the pricing for the M3 MacBook Pro lineup.

You can check out my M3 iMac buying guide for something similar!

M3 Chip Specifications

They may all be built on a new 3-nanometer technology, but these are three very different chips. For instance, the M3 has 25 billion transistors, whereas the M3 Max has 92 billion transistors – and each chip has a different amount of maximum unified memory and compatible SSD storage.

Starting with the CPU, the M3 has one option with eight cores. The M3 Pro CPU has 11 or 12 cores, whereas the M3 Max can be configured with either 14 or 16.

It’s a similar story with the GPU. The M3 has just one option (10-core), the M3 Pro has either 14 or 18 cores, and the M3 Max features a seismic jump in graphics power to either 30 or 40 cores.

When it comes to unified memory, I refuse to get tied up in numbers and confuse you further. All you need to know is that the base model M3 MacBook Pro starts with 8GB and tops out at 24GB, while the M3 Pro goes from 18GB to 36GB and the M3 Max reaches into the stratosphere with 36GB to 128GB. As you work your way through the configuration options, you’ll notice that the available memory changes based on your chip selection.

As for storage, they all start with 512GB, but the M3 tops out at 2TB, the M3 Pro at 4TB, and the M3 Max at 8TB.

There are some similarities. All three chips have the same new (and faster) 16-core neural engine, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, and advanced media engine with AV1 decoding abilities.

Regardless, I’ve hit you with a lot of numbers. What you’re probably asking yourself now is how on earth those numbers relate to you – which brings us to the performance of these three chips and their intended audiences.

M3 vs M3 Pro vs M3 Max Performance

At the time of writing, we don’t have anything to go on beyond Apple’s own claims about the performance of the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips. But we can consider who they’re aimed at, based on Apple’s own market positioning for its latest silicon.

For all but the most spec-obsessed buyers, the numbers above are utterly meaningless – until we recap what Apple said about each chip during the ‘Scary Fast’ unveiling in October.

The M3 chip is, we’re told, aimed at students and content creators. Granted, the latter category is rather wide and full of many different requirements, but I understand what Apple is pitching for here. If you’re learning, experimenting, and delving into your first creative adventure (whatever and wherever that might be), the M3 is the chip to go for – it’s fast and performant enough to process your creations without slowing you down.

The M3 Pro chip is, apparently, for coders, creative pros, and researchers. This is a step up from those who are learning and experimenting. If coding, content creation, and research is your job and the speed with which you can undertake tasks on a computer is related directly to your take-home pay – get the M3 Pro MacBook Pro.

This leaves the M3 Max which, Apple proudly informs us, is for “extreme workflows”. Therefore, if you work in AI, 3D artistry, or serious video production work (it features double the video encoding engines of the M3 Pro), it’s for you. Equally, you’ll need a budget and achievable ROI to make the investment in such a MacBook Pro worth it – because it’ll be so expensive.

You know which category you fall into, right?

Display and design

Good news! This bit is easy.

All three chips power the same beautiful Liquid Retina XDR display with 1,600 nits of peak brightness and the ProMotion high refresh rate.

The differences emerge when you dig into the external display capabilities. The standard M3 can drive just one external display, the M3 Pro supports two, and the M3 Max can drive four. I’m aware that this is a big consideration for certain buyers, therefore it might drive your purchasing decision over some of the specs previously mentioned.

Thankfully, those are the only differences when it comes to the display and design on the M3 MacBook Pros – unless you take into account the port situation.

Oh, and if you want Space Black – because that’s only an option for the M3 Pro and M3 Max!

Battery and ports

All three chips are capable of handling multiple Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, but the M3 is limited to two, while the M3 Pro and M3 Max variants have three (and, therefore, options on either side of the laptop).

Mercifully, Apple chose to standardise the SD card slot and HDMI port across all three chip configurations – along with MagSafe, of course!

The battery is the only element where the M3 beats its faster siblings. The base model chip achieves up to 22 hours of maximum battery life, whereas the M3 Pro and M3 Max hit ‘just’ 18 hours. The sheer performance and resulting power draw from those two chips probably accounts for that.

What M3 MacBook should you buy?

I can’t tell you exactly which M3 MacBook Pro configuration to buy. Your use case and approach to buying this kind of computer is as unique as you are, and it’s not my place to second guess either of those things.

However, there is one thing that will clearly drive every M3 MacBook Pro purchase – your budget. You’ll have a number you don’t want to exceed, which is why it’s important you work carefully with that number while configuring your new machine.

As always, your money is best spent first on choosing the chip configuration that makes the most sense for your use case (for which I would revert back to Apple’s user definitions in the ‘M3 vs M3 Pro vs M3 Max Performance’ section above). Beyond that, I would focus on increasing the unified memory as far as feels sensible, and not going too mad with the SSD storage. The latter is biblically expensive from Apple and you can increase the available storage indefinitely with third-party external SSDs.

So, which M3 MacBook Pro is for you? I’d love to know which configuration you settle on and why – get involved in the comments below, please!

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