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What difference does this make? You’re not supposed to upgrading your Mac every year
Really? Says who? I can't sell my MBP from last year and put the money toward a new model?
Does the same rule apply to phones too?
What else are we not supposed to buy new every year?
 
"This is only a single benchmark result, so further results are needed to ensure accuracy."

But let's publish it anyway to stir up the MacRumor crowd. And sure enough, 235 sarcastic, negative, derogatory, dismissive comments and a video of Linus Sebastian doing his usual smirking hit piece on Apple.
 
Makes sense for Apple to branch off the Pro and Max into their own designs rather than using the Pro as the basis for the Max. The fact that the Pro and Max offered the same CPU performance left a hole in their line up. The M3 now allows them to offer more variations in performance across their product lines; just look at the M3 MacBook Pro product line now...

14": M3/8/10, Pro/11/14, Pro/12/18, Max/14/30
16": Pro/12/18, Max/14/30, Max/16/60

There's no reason for concern at the "lack" of performance in the M3 Pro, it's much better situated between the base M3 and the Max. And a score of 15,000 is nothing to scoff at for a "mid-range" product...

M3: 11,000
M3 Pro: 15,000
M3 Max: 21,000
 
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Really? Says who? I can't sell my MBP from last year and put the money toward a new model?
Does the same rule apply to phones too?
What else are we not supposed to buy new every year?

You can do whatever you want, but Apple doesn't plan their roadmaps with yearly upgrades in mind. iPhone, MacBook or iPad yearly upgraders are a miniscule number.
 
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No. M3 max has extra power cores. M3 pro gets slightly better by REMOVING powerful cores and still delivering these scores.
Everybody including Intel can get more power by adding cores and drawing more power, but very rare you see a slightly improving by removing things. M3 pro is an impressive improvement especially with meshing and ray tracing
Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. They giveth back the extra NAND SSD chip to bring SSD speeds back to normal, and they taketh away cores. Should we be thanking them?
 
Really? Says who? I can't sell my MBP from last year and put the money toward a new model?
Does the same rule apply to phones too?
What else are we not supposed to buy new every year?
change A car a house a plane. So if apple makes m4 3 months later you will buy it?
Remember m2-m3 was 9 months not even a year
Im talking who is going from m2 max to m3 max but for me that meshing and ray tracing is getting me more than 60% improvements
 
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change A car a house a plane. So if apple makes m4 3 months later you will buy it?
Remember m2-m3 was 9 months not even a year
Depends on how great the M4 is over the M3. Regardless, the comment I replied to was about upgrading EVERY YEAR not 3 months.

FYI, M2 was announced June 6, 2022. M3 announced October 30, 2023. Seems like more than a year to me.
 
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Typically a newer generation of CPU has higher performance, and in the case of the M3, it also switched to 3nm, which also increases performance, so with the new CPU and new 3nm, we still only get 6% better?

There's a saying that one can't notice performance increase unless over 10%. The M3 barely surpasses that in single core and misses it on multi-core.
Keep in mind the single core score is considerably higher than just 6%, IIRC, about 15-20%. That has a lot more to do with 3nm than multicore, but you’re talking multicore, which has many variables in its speed, the most important being the number of high performance cores. Apple reduced the number of p-cores from 8 to 6 and increased the number of e-cores from 4 to 6. Remember that going to 3nm means one of two things: faster performance at same clock speeds or less power at same performance. Apple chose to go more for power savings than performance for the M3 Pro. Apple accepted the minor performance gain in exchange for better segmentation in their product lines. You’ll notice the M3 and M3 Max have much higher boosts over their immediate predecessors in multicore They could have easily kept 8 p-cores and 4 e-cores and gotten a much higher performance boost in the M3 Pro. 3nm has nothing to do with that.
 
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Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. They giveth back the extra NAND SSD chip to bring SSD speeds back to normal, and they taketh away cores. Should we be thanking them?
Yep, because only with m3 pro we see the difference and what we gain within new node and new cores
Not with the m3 max
 
Depends on how great the M4 is over the M3. Regardless, the comment I replied to was about upgrading EVERY YEAR not 3 months.

FYI, M2 was announced June 6, 2022. M3 announced October 30, 2023. Seems like more than a year to me.
We are talking about m3 pro max from macbooks pro from January of this yearYea every year for that user means every generation. yes m4 cannot be double over over m3
Maybe Apple will update the macbook airs at WWDC with m4 n3e
 
Doesn’t M3 Pro MBP starts at 18GB, or am I imagining things? ☺️
It does, but I suspect the OP was talking the entire M3 MBP line. The M3 Max starts at a ludicrous 36GB. Funny, I don’t hear the critics complaining about those starting RAM amounts. The M3 iMac does start at 8/256, but it’s a pure consumer machine, but the lowest storage on any M3 MBP is 512GB.
 
The article literally says the M3 Max is up to 45% faster and the M3 20% so yes, you'd expect more.

It doesn't and shouldn't matter the performance increase from the previous generation... what Apple is doing is filling out a huge performance hole in their line up. And if that means the Pro only gets a 14% increase while the other variants get a larger increase, then that's what was needed.

The M1/2 Pro and M1/2 Max had the same CPU performance (they were basically only different in GPU performance). In what CPU world is this normal? At some point Apple was going to have to better differentiate these SoC's... this is how they do that. Apple has moved from 2 CPU designs; M3, Pro, Pro+(Max) to 3 designs, M3, Pro, Max.
 
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Really? Says who? I can't sell my MBP from last year and put the money toward a new model?
Does the same rule apply to phones too?
What else are we not supposed to buy new every year?

Yes, it applies to phones, too.

You do you, but most people don't upgrade their laptop (or phone) every year, nor is that a smart choice unless you really need the bleeding edge, and so Apple isn't going to cater to that.
 
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It does, but I suspect the OP was talking the entire M3 MBP line. The M3 Max starts at a ludicrous 36GB. Funny, I don’t hear the critics complaining about those starting RAM amounts. The M3 iMac does start at 8/256, but it’s a pure consumer machine, but the lowest storage on any M3 MBP is 512GB.
M3 imac consumer that it has hardware meshing and ray tracing ..that is no long consumer grades but it also can performs at semi pro level actions. An cpu that crashes every intel and amd low, mid tier and some top tier cpu , one SoC that overpowered so many..
 
Really? Says who? I can't sell my MBP from last year and put the money toward a new model?
Does the same rule apply to phones too?
What else are we not supposed to buy new every year?
Did anyone say you were forbidden to or did I clearly say you’re not supposed to? These products are designed to be incremental upgrades for those who are in market for a new computer. Very few people upgrade their computer every year.
 
It does, but I suspect the OP was talking the entire M3 MBP line. The M3 Max starts at a ludicrous 36GB. Funny, I don’t hear the critics complaining about those starting RAM amounts. The M3 iMac does start at 8/256, but it’s a pure consumer machine, but the lowest storage on any M3 MBP is 512GB.
Yeah I don’t know where he got 256 from? M3 MBP starts at 512.

and the thread is about M3 Pro but the guy’s still going on and on with 8GB RAM lol.
 
Not sure why people are downvoting this. Your take is 100% realistic. People seem to be stuck in a 90s mindset when computers made massive leaps year over year, but we're literally reaching a limit defined by physics here in terms of what we can do with computing.

Well, yes and no. Until recently, Apple's cores had bigger leaps.

Single-core YOY Geekbench 5 increases:

1699191766880.png


If you go further back, it's even more dramatic. A5 to A6 is a 226% improvement in Geekbench 3 — more than three times as fast.

Since about the A14, things have slowed down. Is that a result of some key people leaving for Nuvia? Is it that Apple is preparing a bigger bang that isn't quite ready?
 
"This is only a single benchmark result, so further results are needed to ensure accuracy."

But let's publish it anyway to stir up the MacRumor crowd. And sure enough, 235 sarcastic, negative, derogatory, dismissive comments and a video of Linus Sebastian doing his usual smirking hit piece on Apple.
It’s all fun. Brings out all the whiners from all corners.
 
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I am surprised at people saying these are a flop, especially when the m3 max matches the m2 ultra speed now. How does that not impress you since the ultra was 2x m2 max chips together?

i am happy to see apple cleaned up the chips, it was a mess with the m2 pro having the same cores as the max. With the m3 hitting 10k multi core score , the pro 15k and the max 20k it now makes sense.
 
This discussion reminds me of car enthusiasts arguing over horsepower and torque numbers as well 0-60 and 1/4 mile times. It’s all noise and nonsense that is totally meaningless in the real world driving on actual streets and highways. People arguing it’s not a “real” Mustang unless it has a V8. But in the real world that V8 won’t get you to work or the store any faster to buy a jug of milk.

As a group Apple’s M-series computers are impressively fast and power efficient, and they’ve been upgraded significantly since they were introduced three years ago. In real world applications no one is going to give a damn about the finer points in terms of specs because in real world applications these machines have already proven themselves. M3 will be no different.

Re: the argument that 8/256 is a joke in 2023. From a price point perspective it really does strike one as odd, but in real world comparisons it’s a different matter. There have been numerous real world reviews showing you can easily do video editing and 3D modelling on M1 and M2 MacBooks with 8/256. Not ideal, sure, but the machines aren’t gasping. Try doing those things on an Intel device with 8/256 and it’s a whole other matter as the machine is soon ready to disintegrate in your hands.

You can’t obsess over mere numbers—they don’t tell the whole story. Real world tests have shown M1 and M2 performing better than their specs might otherwise suggest. I’ve little doubt M3 will be the same.

When M3 is put into the MacBook Airs it’s going to be sweet. Meanwhile there is no new MacBook Pro with 8/256. The entry level MacBook Pro 14 is 8/512.
 
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This isn't true. People are simply pointing out flaws in your rationale. On an intel chip, yes 8/256 is terrible. On an M series chip it's actually pretty good. My buddy literally has the base model m2 MacBook Air and edits 4k surgery videos on it all the time just fine. M series chips perform vastly different, you can't compare the two directly.

When you point that out though, posters like you assume we are "defending apple on asinine product decisions" when we're simply just speaking the truth. It's a good option for people who dont want to spend a ton on a computer.
8GB isn't a disaster for the average user on Mac, I totally agree. 256GB base storage however is a spit in the face whether Mac or PC.
 
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