My wife uses my old 13" MBP and has never plugged anything into it besides power, and she's used it for several years. She has an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch.
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14-Inch MacBook Pro With M3 Chip Has Only Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports
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I guess the pro line will be a M3 and Air M2 … until Pro will jump to M4 and air to M3 like with the phones … and will probably will be the same for IPad … I get the idea … Smart
"...professional work flows..." Well that depends a LOT on your profession. Most professional software devs would have no problems at all with using this machine. Some might struggle with the 24GB RAM limit, but many would do just fine. Some might prefer faster compile times if they have huge and complex build processes, but that could be solved by improving their dev ops process.
I suspect that the percentage of professional Mac users, who require high GPU performance, is actually quite low. For the rest of us, the GPU power of the base M1 chip is massive overkill.
because they’re looking at what their best selling models tells about their consumers?
if it wasn’t selling they’d not even attempt this.
watch them give you that then drop another Thunderbolt port or cap the SSD speed again.
I was talking about buyers (well, complainers, who aren't necessarily buyers), not Apple.
thunderbolt might be able to power the laptop while using it. the only thing that i need is a freaking usb-c port on the right hand side of the laptop and they removed it
Exactly.
It pretty much boils down to the display.
If you want the gorgeous XDR display you get the base pro, otherwise you're much better off with the Air.
They didn't "remove" anything (well, I guess they removed the touch bar...). You get more for your money today than yesterday.
The fact that Apple's entry models are very barebone, is nothing new, so I don't know what it is people think they are adding to the conversation with these comments.
The way I see it is, Apple actually wants you to buy the 1799,- model (probably the more expensive ones of course, but for the sake of the argument). This is the sweetspot for performance vs price. But, the way to sell more of this machine is not to have it be the entry point, the way to do it is to have a cheaper entry point, to get more people interested because people have sticker shock, and then upsell. If they had the same 1799,- price for the 16 GB and the 8 GB was 50,- less, who would be winning?
Of course you can then say "they should give me the high spec at the low price", but you can say that about anything, which renders the argument useless. You can argue that you don't like upselling, but that's not a complaint about Apple, that's a complaint about business in general, in other words, capitalism as a whole (without which we wouldn't have any computers to have this discussion about).
Assuming you don't care about faster performance, or an HDMI port, or an SD slot, or longer battery life, or faster charging - yes.
It only supports one EXTERNAL monitor. TB3 supports two monitors on a Mac Mini, but these are laptops. That's the one major criticism I have about these, although it doesn't matter to me personally.
In which way do you believe this is a step backwards? (unless you are the guy that liked the touch bar).
Air starts at 8GB too. So your imaginary "Air with bells and whistles" is NOT upgraded to 16GB?
My mother-in-law has not connected anything other than a printer to her iMac for eight years.
Personally, I have connected a USB hub to do some very specific speaker calibration stuff where I needed to connect USB-A gear (which four USB-C ports wouldn't have fixed). Other than that, I have done none of the above the last two years. Never used an external hard drive, never needed an Ethernet connection, never needed an SD slot (haven't had a seperate camera for 4 years). And why would I need to sync my iPhone? To do what?
Power users tend to believe everyone is a power user.
What we have is opinions and guesses. What Apple has is actual user statistics. They know EXACTLY how much RAM the average user is using, and how often something is plugged into their ports.
I can't say for sure how Apple's products are made, and I'm not a mechanical engineer, but at least in the lower volume production I work with, this would be the same tool but the holes are an added process. With the volume Apple is working at, a new tool is really not significant, but an extra process to add one more hole is. Again, I must stress that I am just guessing here.
It's more likely to be due to limitations in the SoC though.
Agree. My "professional workflow" is Outlook, web browser, word, (very simple) excel, powerpoint. "Pro" means "Work computer", not "I'm a Programmer"!
No, it doesn't. The M2 Macbook Pro also had two TB3 ports, while the M2 Mac Mini has two TB4 ports. No reason an M3 Mac Mini wouldn't have TB4 ports.
Does it mean that I can connect it with my Dell 8K Monitor (UP3218K) that requires two display ports for 8k60?🙋
It has to be a hardware limitation, they had to rework the logic board and the case because the SD card slot moved over in place of the USBC port.
No it won't. Its all about display support.
For most practical purposes, TB4 is just an Intel certification scheme for USB4 implementations, but with a stricter set of minimum requirements than USB4 or TB 3.
One of those requirements is being able to drive a minimum of two external displays via Thunderbolt.
The base M1/M2/M3 chips only support a total of two physical displays.
Laptops and iMacs have one internal display so they can only support one external display. Therefore they can't claim to have Thunderbolt 4 ports and have to be advertised as "TB3" although they do support some USB4 features such as multi-port USB4 hubs.
Mac Minis don't have an internal display, so they can support two external displays - on the original M1 Mini one of those had to be HDMI - so no TB4 certification - but since the M2 Mini they could both be on Thunderbolt so the ports qualify as Thunderbolt 4.
The Pro/Max versions of Apple Silicon support more physical displays so they always qualify as TB4.
Nothing has changed here (at least since the M2 Mini).
What expensive M3 Pro?
old M2 Pro 14" MBP (3 TB4 ports) : $1999 (see everymac.com)
new M3 Pro 14" MBP (3 TB4 ports) : $1999 (see apple.com)
The price for the M3 Pro equivalent to your M2 Pro hasn't changed a cent (and now comes with 18GB RAM).
The $1600 plain-M3 MBP replaces the $1300 "entry level" plain-M2 13" MBP which has never had more than 2 TB ports (since 2016) and - at least since Apple Silicon - has never supported more than a single external display. I'm not sure its very good value - 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD on a $1600 machine is a bad joke, but that was already a bad joke at $1300 and, otherwise, the new model has a substantially bigger/better screen, magsafe, HDMI etc. to justify the price hike. Anyway, if you wanted the Mx Pro MacBook Pro then the new plain-M3 is irrelevant to you.