(upbeat music)
- All right, so there are two new things about
this new laptop from Apple.
The new color and the new chip.
(upbeat music)
Everything that was already great about
the outside of Apple's laptop redesign is still great.
It still has a bunch of ports.
The full size HDMI, the MagSafe is still here,
still has that high quality build, the boxy design,
the super bright display.
Also everything that was awkward about it
is also still awkward about it.
Still has this nice big notch at the top with just a webcam
and no face unlock.
But it comes in black now, kind of.
It looked a lot darker in Apple's announcement video.
Like the color is literally called Space Black, right?
So I'm expecting a really, really black laptop.
And in the commercial it looks awesome.
They talk about this fancy new anodization process
for the aluminum, so it's not a coating,
it's an actual new chemistry process that is a part
of the anodization itself.
It's supposed to be extra fingerprint resistant.
But now that we actually have it here, in reality,
I mean, it's darker, but like,
it's just a little bit darker
than the other Space Gray from before.
If you wanna see a black laptop,
this is a black laptop,
like they make black laptops already.
So Apple's here is just, it's a darker gray.
I think it's basically the darkest
that Apple could get without showing a ton of fingerprints.
I mean, it still does show some fingerprints a little bit.
It's definitely not completely immune.
But compared to some other black laptops I've tried,
it is better than those.
So it's somewhere in the middle of not so many fingerprints,
but also darker than normal.
It's fine, it's darker, which is nice.
Like some camera angles it hits, it really looks dark,
but you get the idea.
It also, if you're curious,
it also comes with black apple stickers,
and it also comes with a black MagSafe charging cable,
but also, that braided cable is darker than the end.
And it also comes with a brick that's still white.
So I wouldn't say they fully committed
to the Space Black theme quite yet.
I'll give 'em partial credit.
But then let's talk about the chip inside.
So the new three nanometer M3 family
of chips gets announced
and it does offer some
nice improvements over the M2 family, definitely.
It almost feels weird to compare it
to the M2 stuff because almost nobody
with an M2 should be upgrading to this,
but at least it's a good frame of reference.
So I've been testing the absolute highest end
M3 Max in this laptop,
which from the M2 Max goes from a 38 core GPU
to a 40 core GPU.
And from 96 gigs of shared memory to now up to 128 gigs.
CPU wise, Apple's claims were about right.
Somewhere in the 20 sometimes 30% improvement range
over last year, which is very respectable.
And actually, it's a bigger jump in single core performance
than I was expecting, which is awesome for
just the daily use, the quick snappy,
everyday computing, browsing type stuff.
And then GPU wise, this is where more people were hoping
for a little bit of a bigger improvement.
And again, it is a respectable bump.
Not quite leapfrogging the big discreet GPUs,
but still putting M3 Max's GPU up at the level
of M1 Ultra.
So that's pretty impressive.
And matching somewhere
around AMD Radeon RX 6800 on benchmarks
or about an RTX 3070, which is, you know,
we're talking a fairly mid-range card at this point.
But that's the thing about all this new GPU performance
and the benchmarks and all that is great,
but what's actually more interesting, at least to me,
is what you're actually going to do with
that extra performance, that extra graphics power.
And for a laptop like this, that's typically games
or high powered graphics related applications.
So yeah, when you see that powerful new GPU in a laptop
with new hardware accelerated ray tracing
for the first time in a Mac and the mesh shading
and all that, probably the first thing you think is gaming.
But then you realize it's a Mac.
So probably not gaming.
But really I think the reason, at least in my head,
that most people don't associate gaming with Macs
is not because they're not powerful.
I mean, they're not as powerful
as the highest industry GPUs, but they're not bad.
It's just because the games that people play
and are enthusiastic about
are often not available on the Mac.
Like, I'm not even a big PC gamer,
but you already know, if you want to play "The Witcher,"
the new "Fallout," "Skyrim," "Crysis,"
"Apex Legends," there's a long list.
And if you want to throw maximum GPU power at that game
to play it in the best possible quality,
you're looking to optimize a PC, not buy a Mac.
So I actually think, and I think it's maybe worth
an entire separate video,
maybe let me know if you're interested,
but I think gaming on the Mac is in an all time
interesting place right now,
because again, lots of games are not available on the Mac,
but this is the most powerful Mac that's ever been made.
And I've been playing with some of the games
that Apple likes to show off, like in the app store.
They're like, "Guys, we have games.
There's lots of games and they're really good
and they take advantage of the new stuff."
I've been playing this game called "Lies of P."
It's one of the ones they talked about in the keynote
and it takes advantage
of the hardware accelerated ray tracing.
You can see it in the reflections and on the floor
and in the sword and everything.
It plays amazing. Like it looks great.
Frame rates stay high. I'm playing at 4K resolution.
There's a visual depth and detail that's beautiful.
Plus, macOS Sonoma has the gaming mode,
which is allocating as much power as possible to this game.
It also lets you use a Bluetooth controller
with way faster sampling and lower latency.
And so just maxing out everything works great.
It's an awesome playing experience.
I was very impressed.
I just don't care about this game.
I'm not invested in that particular game at all.
It was fun to play the demo,
and I was impressed with the actual moment of the computing.
It would get a little warm and the fans would spin up,
but the fact that it would work
on those Mac settings is amazing.
I just don't, I'm not invested in that game at all.
And I think that sort of encapsulates the way I feel
about all this extra GPU power,
is like, you could use it for gaming,
but if you're gonna buy a computer for this much money
to game, you're not buying a Mac.
But then again, of course, this is a Pro laptop,
it's a MacBook Pro.
And so there are lots of other non-games that take advantage
of this extra GPU power
and of this new hardware accelerated ray tracing
and the mesh shading and all of that.
Things like Cinema 4D and this laptop
with this chip is better than ever at all that stuff too.
And I think we're actually gonna slowly start seeing
even more apps on the Mac take advantage
of this stuff as time goes on.
But my conclusion was, okay, look, when the event happened,
I watched it and that last video you can see in
that hotel room, and I was very excited about it.
It got announced, I saw a new matte black MacBook
with a new chip, and I thought that
that new color on top of that new chip
would be enough for me to go, "All right, you know what?
It's finally time, I'm gonna upgrade."
So I did, I clicked the order button
and I purchased a new maxed out
M3 Max MacBook Pro in matte black.
But now that I've actually had this review unit here,
and I've gone through my testing and I've experienced it,
the color is kind of nice,
but it's not quite as impressive
and new as I was maybe hoping.
And then the new chip, it's great and everything,
but it's not actually going
to make a meaningful difference to my workflow.
With a couple of videos I edit on the go on my laptop
from the M1 Max laptop that I've been using.
So I canceled.
I logged in and I canceled my order
and I will continue to daily what I have for the past,
I guess, three years now,
with the M1 Max 16 inch MacBook Pro.
Turns out it's not for me.
Well, I mean, I guess it is a high-end matte black laptop.
So maybe it is kind of for me.
But I think the point I'm trying
to make is if you already have an M family chip MacBook
in the tier that you want,
meaning if you have an M2 Pro or an M1 Pro,
M3 Pro is not gonna be the huge difference for you.
If you have M2 Max or M1 Max,
M3 Max is not really for you.
This is like any other spec bump
far more for people with older machines.
You didn't need to hear me say this,
but it's true for people with older machines,
with Intel machines,
or with machines in a different tier,
where this would really unlock something new
in their workflow.
And that's what's great about 'em,
is you're gonna get a better machine than ever.
For me, I'm gonna keep using M1 Max.
That's a testament to how good that thing is.
Maybe I'll do a two years later,
three years later review or something like that.
But for now, I'm glad there's a new darker color available.
But yeah, you know, it's weirdly not for me.
Still a great laptop, still great displays,
amazing speakers, awesome build quality,
battery life's still awesome.
But maybe my upgrade will come when
they really commit to the matte black thing
or there's another huge upgrade somewhere down the line.