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16-Inch M3 Max MacBook Pro Now Costs $7,200 With All Upgrades
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The naming of these devices are so confusing. You can get a 16” MacBook Pro Max where the size is inches and the speed is Max. Then you can get a iPhone 15 Pro Max where the size is Max and the speed is, well nothing.
Yeah I just placed an order for a high end model and with AppleCare it clocked in at just under £6k. I don't mind the RAM costs as it's direct on the silicon but the thing that smarts is the SSD. But I don't want to use an external and 2TB has not been enough with my Mac Studio so I had to go up to 4TB. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
By the way, as a sanity check, while chatting to a friend just now, I worked out what the cost of my first MacBook Pro would have been today with inflation. It was a mid range 15.4" 2008 Unibody stock. That came in at £1749 at the time. Today, with CPI based inflation, that works out to be £2725 which puts it smack bang between the two 16" M3 Pro options. So they haven't got 'more' expensive in real terms in the decade and a half since then. The line is much more broad though, starting a fair chunk lower and ending a fair chunk higher but it's now possible to get workstation level performance in a laptop that was just not possible a decade ago.
By the way, as a sanity check, while chatting to a friend just now, I worked out what the cost of my first MacBook Pro would have been today with inflation. It was a mid range 15.4" 2008 Unibody stock. That came in at £1749 at the time. Today, with CPI based inflation, that works out to be £2725 which puts it smack bang between the two 16" M3 Pro options. So they haven't got 'more' expensive in real terms in the decade and a half since then. The line is much more broad though, starting a fair chunk lower and ending a fair chunk higher but it's now possible to get workstation level performance in a laptop that was just not possible a decade ago.
If raytracing is THAT important to you when you play Myst in your Mac, then it’s totally for you.
I think I spotted the outlier year: 2017. What do I win?
Good. I hate external disks too, even SSD’s (Sandisk are almost as fast - 2050mb/s but not even near 6000mb/s plus I hate dongles they’re not handy). Why only 4TB though? You’ll be maxed out in no time. And in a few months you’ll regret not pulling the trigger on the 8TB.
whats wrong with an external drive? You literally can save thousand of dollars by using a small portable drive. Justification for using 4 or even 8TB of internal memory only seems very ridiculous.
The has nothing to do with anything.
Do influencers get one for free? So I can start influencing!!!
Forget the maxed out price, the memory and SSD upgrade prices are extremely aggressive heading into the current market.
2021 M1 Pro/Max all day battery disruptive processor laptop for the WFH covid market that just had $Trillions helicoptered on US population = extremely profitable and awesome timing.
2023 M3 Pro/Max laptops with some spec updates thrown into a maturing market, with M1/M2 variants floating around at deep discounts...all while consumers are cutting back spending = good luck!
2021 M1 Pro/Max all day battery disruptive processor laptop for the WFH covid market that just had $Trillions helicoptered on US population = extremely profitable and awesome timing.
2023 M3 Pro/Max laptops with some spec updates thrown into a maturing market, with M1/M2 variants floating around at deep discounts...all while consumers are cutting back spending = good luck!
One caveat is that you can't get a laptop with a 124GB (ish) video graphics. I don't think you can get a desktop GPU at that either. How much is it worth to you? That will but up to the purchaser.
I spend that much on aftershave. Monthly.
I know how much my company pays for my health insurance, and this is starting to be comparable in price. As in, how much of a macbook pros can you get for a year of health insurance?
$7000 is a lot of money for a tool, and quite frankly I'm not sure that there are that many companies who would fork over $7000 for a laptop, when so many other better and cheaper options exist.
As in, what can a $7000 laptop do that a $3500 laptop can't, that also can't be offloaded to a cluster (locally or in the cloud) to do?
It's quite expensive, but also remember this spec is the best and most powerful MacBook Pro Apple has ever made. It's hard to imagine Apple introducing a new high-end chip anytime soon that can surpass this awe-inspiring performance.
This literally is the best laptop anyone has ever made. And obviously this level of amazing performance is going to cost a few bucks.
This literally is the best laptop anyone has ever made. And obviously this level of amazing performance is going to cost a few bucks.
Good. I hate external disks too, even SSD’s (Sandisk). Why only 4TB though? You’ll be maxed out in no time. And in a few months you’ll regret not pulling the trigger on the 8TB.
Says someone who uses entry-level MBPs for amateur use (Office and emails).
It is very wrong in the sense that you have to have your files in different places, quite annoying.
Also Dropbox stopped supporting external disk sync which further complicates things.
And lastly as already mentioned, even the fastest external SSDs are not as fast Apple’s internal SSD (which for heavy programming and music production / hires video editing is a deal breaker).
I only keep an external disk for my continuous TimeMachine backups + Dropbox Business. Multiplying external disks would be a waste of time and space (and ruining workflow).
When one can afford the best of the best with Apple, they certainly should settle for no less than 8TB.
I use my computers also for video, audio and graphic work. And even those emails and reports are professional paid work. Learn something every day. Carrying gigabytes of raw footage in internal memory doesn't make you pro.
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I use an external SSD drive for all my User folders. Best way I found to work with 3 Macs in 2 locations. 1 MBP and 2 minies. 1 at home and 1 at the studio. Cloud sync is not that great when you work with large media files.
We don't know if M4 will ever launch. Apple will need a lot of time to surpass what they have announced here.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Of course. But what are kidneys going for?
Do you really need BOTH legs? A entire liver?
To each their own. Whenever I skimp on SSD, I find myself constantly moving FCP projects back and forth between external and internal SSD because I keep running out of space. But that's just the nature of my work.
So I finally maxed out my current MBP (and my wife got a really nice, slightly used, M1 Max with 4TB). I haven't regretted it (and she finally stopped complaining about Intel-MBP fan noise...ha ha).
That said...I have a heck of a time trying to max out my CPU or GPU. I can't get Final Cut Pro nor Compressor to use the full M2 Max (or even close). And I still, almost inexplicably, get hiccups and beach balls.
So at this point, I'm not sure if I'll ever notice the difference with an M3...at least until the software that I use better utilizes the hardware. In the meantime...for many workflows, there's a diminishing return with each new generation (since the M1 leap).
Dropbox, unlike any other cloud services, actually works fantastic even with large files. That’s the beauty of it, no limits. My 10gb/sec internet handles it so smoothly. Hence the maxed out MBP disk space. It would be a waste of space to have multiple drives, especially since I happen to commute with the laptop occasionally.