The New MacBook Pro Review: A Closer Look at Apple's Latest Flagship Laptops

In our previous review, we took a closer look at the new MacBook Pro lineup and discussed its impressive features and specs. Now, let's dive deeper into the details of each model, including their display performance, brightness, and color accuracy.

Display Performance: Brightness and Color Accuracy

The new MacBook Pro lineup boasts some impressive display performance, with the 14-inch model featuring a Retina XDR display that meets Apple's own rating for SDR brightness. This translates to a maximum brightness of 600 nits in SDR mode and an even higher peak brightness of around 1000 nits in xdr mode. The color accuracy is also excellent, with the P3 gamut coverage being virtually 100% effective. However, we did notice that the default HDR mode can sometimes over-brighten the image, which may be a concern for those who prefer a more balanced look.

To mitigate this issue, Apple has included a picture mode called PQ 2084, which tracks HDR brightness much more accurately and provides a better viewing experience. The local dimming on these displays is also some of the best we've seen on non-OLED screens, with over 2000 zones on the 14-inch model and over 2500 zones on the 16-inch model.

Performance: Single-Core and Multicore Benchmarks

In terms of performance, the new MacBook Pro lineup has made significant strides. The single-threaded performance is quite impressive, with the M3 Pro models tracking around 20% faster performance compared to their non-Pro counterparts. This translates to a substantial difference in real-world usage, where tasks like video editing and rendering become noticeably quicker.

When it comes to multicore benchmarks, the M3 Pro models also excel. In Cinebench 2024, they score around 30-40% higher than their non-Pro counterparts, even when running on the more power-efficient 3nm process node. This suggests that Apple has managed to strike a great balance between performance and power consumption, which is essential for mobile devices.

Battery Life: A Closer Look at the MacBook Pro's Power Management

One of the areas where Apple excels is in battery life. The new MacBook Pro lineup offers some impressive endurance tests, with the 16-inch model lasting around 24 hours and 30 minutes on our YouTube endurance test, while the 14-inch model lasts around 21 hours.

The charging times are also noteworthy, with the 16-inch model taking around an hour and a half to reach full charge, and the 14-inch model requiring slightly less time – around an hour and 45 minutes. This is likely due to the smaller battery in the 14-inch chassis being balanced by the larger charger.

Comparing the M2 Pro Mac Mini to the MacBook Pro

In our review of the new Mac Mini lineup, we noted that it's a superstar when it comes to performance, often matching or exceeding the MacBook Pro. If you're looking for a laptop that can offer similar performance without the hefty price tag, the Mac Mini might be worth considering.

However, if you're set on a laptop, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is an excellent choice. While it's certainly more expensive than its non-Pro counterparts, the added features and performance make it well worth the investment. The starting price of $2500 for the base model M3 Pro is steep, but it's worth noting that this price includes some impressive specs, including 18-core GPU, 36 gigs of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

The most expensive MacBook Pro in the lineup is the M3 Max, which starts at an eye-watering $3500. This is certainly not for the faint of heart, but if you're looking for top-of-the-line performance and features, it's worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's no secret that I'm kind of a Macbook guy so when Apple's new M3 MacBook launched I kind of started to second guess my framework 16 pre-order so when we had to unbox it for short circuit I figured this is the perfect time to get a little bit of handson now I did pre-order a framework 16 to replace my kind of Aging now Intel Core I9 MacBook Pro which is also a 16-in full disclosure Linus is invested in framework I am not they just look really sick and I want to try one but this could be a serious competitor I like the framework for its repairability and the modular discret GPU but man there is something to be said for Macos battery life I don't know if I'll be able to go back to Windows in a laptop form factor this is the 16-in MacBook Pro M3 Pro the pro pro M3 pro pro I like this this has letters I like I like M3s I like pros and I like MacBooks I think this color is called space BL black pretty sexy if I were to hold it like that that's that's like the same color as a normal MacBook and then I'm it's down now it's black who crazy Inside the Box we've got the usual Apple propaganda here designed by Apple in California stickers wait is this a is this a joke dude there's a spacer in here it looks like there's more in there there's not that's just like folded cardboard maybe it's so all the boxes can be the same and like some countries have more regulatory stuff than others we've got the standard Apple charger this is 140 W brick man Apple's going to have to start making these things smaller and then there is the really sexy Apple cables what is this this is this got to be 2 m they don't list it on the Apple website but uh I think it's 2 m for comparison sake here is the M3 non-pro 14in MacBook Pro and then this is the last generation M2 Pro MacBook Pro 14 I just wanted to see visually physically if the 14s were any different it doesn't look like it I mean the keyboard it's the same I mean which one is this even the M2 this is the M2 okay you're definitely not like flexing you know when the new iPhone comes out you can always tell oh they've got like the big cameras the fancy ones oh it's the titanium one nope this one just looks the same in order we've got our M3 Pro on the bottom M3 nonpr and M2 Pro the I/O on this side is going to be functionally looking the same you've got two Thunderbolt 4/ usb4 you've got your magsafe charger and audio except on the non-pro these are Thunderbolt 3 instead of Thunderbolt 4 but they do also still support USB 4 across the Spectrum it was the same on the M2 generation as it is on the M3 generation in that regard on the other side we've got HDMI an extra Thunderbolt if you have a pro or better CPU and then an SD card reader but for the rest of this I'm want to focus on the space black one ooh but before I can get to the software I got to tell you about our sponsor dbrand this is Jake Bell's laptop which has this cool tear down skin here I am a big fan of putting a skin on my laptop and I'm not just saying that cuz it's sponsored they protect your laptop from scratches which is the big thing especially if you're somebody that likes to upgrade every couple years uh and sell your old one having it be minty underneath that skin big selling bonus now on the topic of tear down they have the spiritual successor to tear down now called x-ray the Mad Lads at brand literally hauled a bunch of MacBooks into a specialized Metrology lab resulting in ultra high detailed highquality scans of the devices x-ray comes in both light and dark variants but for a limited time dbrand is offering you both for the price of one so if you'd like to pick up some x-ray skins for your MacBook or any other device head to short.com okay let's look at the damn software looks like Macos feels like Mac OS even smells like Macos physically speaking it's not super clear what the difference differences are here but Apple has this handy thing on their website that allows you to compare Mac models this is not a very Apple feeling feature to have on their website until you start scrolling down and then it makes more sense because up to a 16 core CPU you know it sounds like oh this is an M3 Pro I'm going to get more cores on my M2 Pro not really same thing for the GPU and the memory if we scroll down you can see the M2 Pro is a 12 core with eight performance cores and four efficiency cores while the M3 Pro also a 12 core except it has less performance cores and more efficiency ones we'll see in the labs testing if it actually makes a major difference I suspect knowing that it's Apple that it probably doesn't make a huge difference we are moving to tsmc's 3 nanometer process node on the new CPUs so there's going to be an efficiency Improvement I bet you looking at this that they're going to take that Improvement make the laptop be better on battery and perform pretty similarly ALS also we have less memory bandwidth um for most people probably not going to make a big difference for video editing might but also there's a ton of Hardware acceleration on MacBook so maybe less we do have av1 decoding which is great uh no does it not have encoding for av1 yeah okay Bell confirmed no av1 encoding kind of weird you get a little bit more RAM on the same skew so 16 versus 18 gigs compared to the M2 dang this like the same level laptop uh so maybe the next laptop for me is going to be a used M2 Pro for a substantial discount let's try out the speakers I think they're the same they both sound good if you really care that much put headphones in I mean display display looks good is it different I don't think so I didn't see anything different in the specs page so probably not but let's take a look at the labs results and see in terms of brightness on the display we're pretty much right in line with what Apple rates it as for display brightness in SDR we're at 600 nits which is exactly what Apple rates it as and for Peak HDR brightness in xdr mode as Apple calls it we're right at600 nits as rated uh I think we did see ever so slightly higher on a full screen test it looks like it was around 1,00 and Apple only says 1,000 so that's cool they're decently color accurate the P3 gamut coverage is pretty much effectively 100% the average SDR Delta e are around 1.5 average around 3 to 3.5 Max which is decently color accurate although the default HDR mode tends to kind of over brighten what you see uh to give it a bit of more of a Punchy Costco effect but there is a picture mode called PQ 2084 that tracks HDR brightness much more accurately and as with the last generation the local dimming is still some of the best we've seen on pretty much any non OLED display you're looking at 2,000 plus zones on the 14in and then 2500 Plus on the 16in which is really good considering how small that screen is but what about performance H the single threader performance is quite a bit better like in the range of 20% Which is substantial even the non-pro M3 is tracking 20% faster than an M2 Max last time or about 17% faster than the M2 Pro which is pretty substantial moving over to multicore at least in cine bench 2024 the M3 pro picks up 30 plus% on an M2 Pro albeit in a 14-in chassis which is quite substantial that 3 nimer process node is offering some substantial substantial performance here even considering we have less performance more efficiency cores I kind of assumed it was going to be the same but lower power draw um but it seems like it's better and probably lower power draw battery life has expected excels on these new MacBooks we're looking at 24 1/2 hours in our YouTube endurance test on the 16in and around 21 hours on the 14-in that's to be expected because it's a pretty substantially smaller battery in the 14-in chassis for stress test pretty much exactly the same and then the time to full charge is around an hour and a half and an hour and 45 respectively much bigger charger on the 16-in and then a smaller battery on the 14in so those kind of balance each other out to be pretty similar overall after I've looked at some of the other benchmarks it seems like in a fair few situations we quite a bit faster on this new generation which is great it's probably going to be more efficient you're talking a 3 nanometer process node which is quite a bit smaller we have more transistors from the M2 non-pro to the M3 non-pro 20 billion to 25 billion which is a huge increase except confusingly going from the M2 Pro to the M3 Pro we have less 40 billion versus 37 and still it's generally faster one thing that I'm noting out of all of this is the M2 Pro Mac Mini is kind of a superstar it seems most of the time it's like almost as fast so if you're just using this at your desk you might want to look at a Mac Mini from last gen either way faster laptop in most cases battery life still nuts as ever screen still excellent I like the new colors Apple keep doing a good job you make great laptops but they are godamn expensive like seriously how much is this thing I don't even want to look $1,600 for the base spec 14in MacBook Pro if we look at the 16-in MacBook Pro which is what I'm interested in maybe I'm less interested now in 16in land it's $2500 for the Bas speec M3 Pro that's a 12 core CPU 18 core GPU 18 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD you bump up to 36 gigs of RAM like we have and a 1 tbte 3100 with a 512 2900 and if you go for the M3 Max it starts at 3500 USR what's the just humor me what is the most expensive MacBook Pro holy crap that is 7200 H maybe I'll be uh a buying for a new credit card soon if you're interested in more information on these laptops Mac address our Apple channel will have a full review coming very shortly get subscribed like the video God damn why do the nice things have to be so expensive it's just pretty damnit's no secret that I'm kind of a Macbook guy so when Apple's new M3 MacBook launched I kind of started to second guess my framework 16 pre-order so when we had to unbox it for short circuit I figured this is the perfect time to get a little bit of handson now I did pre-order a framework 16 to replace my kind of Aging now Intel Core I9 MacBook Pro which is also a 16-in full disclosure Linus is invested in framework I am not they just look really sick and I want to try one but this could be a serious competitor I like the framework for its repairability and the modular discret GPU but man there is something to be said for Macos battery life I don't know if I'll be able to go back to Windows in a laptop form factor this is the 16-in MacBook Pro M3 Pro the pro pro M3 pro pro I like this this has letters I like I like M3s I like pros and I like MacBooks I think this color is called space BL black pretty sexy if I were to hold it like that that's that's like the same color as a normal MacBook and then I'm it's down now it's black who crazy Inside the Box we've got the usual Apple propaganda here designed by Apple in California stickers wait is this a is this a joke dude there's a spacer in here it looks like there's more in there there's not that's just like folded cardboard maybe it's so all the boxes can be the same and like some countries have more regulatory stuff than others we've got the standard Apple charger this is 140 W brick man Apple's going to have to start making these things smaller and then there is the really sexy Apple cables what is this this is this got to be 2 m they don't list it on the Apple website but uh I think it's 2 m for comparison sake here is the M3 non-pro 14in MacBook Pro and then this is the last generation M2 Pro MacBook Pro 14 I just wanted to see visually physically if the 14s were any different it doesn't look like it I mean the keyboard it's the same I mean which one is this even the M2 this is the M2 okay you're definitely not like flexing you know when the new iPhone comes out you can always tell oh they've got like the big cameras the fancy ones oh it's the titanium one nope this one just looks the same in order we've got our M3 Pro on the bottom M3 nonpr and M2 Pro the I/O on this side is going to be functionally looking the same you've got two Thunderbolt 4/ usb4 you've got your magsafe charger and audio except on the non-pro these are Thunderbolt 3 instead of Thunderbolt 4 but they do also still support USB 4 across the Spectrum it was the same on the M2 generation as it is on the M3 generation in that regard on the other side we've got HDMI an extra Thunderbolt if you have a pro or better CPU and then an SD card reader but for the rest of this I'm want to focus on the space black one ooh but before I can get to the software I got to tell you about our sponsor dbrand this is Jake Bell's laptop which has this cool tear down skin here I am a big fan of putting a skin on my laptop and I'm not just saying that cuz it's sponsored they protect your laptop from scratches which is the big thing especially if you're somebody that likes to upgrade every couple years uh and sell your old one having it be minty underneath that skin big selling bonus now on the topic of tear down they have the spiritual successor to tear down now called x-ray the Mad Lads at brand literally hauled a bunch of MacBooks into a specialized Metrology lab resulting in ultra high detailed highquality scans of the devices x-ray comes in both light and dark variants but for a limited time dbrand is offering you both for the price of one so if you'd like to pick up some x-ray skins for your MacBook or any other device head to short.com okay let's look at the damn software looks like Macos feels like Mac OS even smells like Macos physically speaking it's not super clear what the difference differences are here but Apple has this handy thing on their website that allows you to compare Mac models this is not a very Apple feeling feature to have on their website until you start scrolling down and then it makes more sense because up to a 16 core CPU you know it sounds like oh this is an M3 Pro I'm going to get more cores on my M2 Pro not really same thing for the GPU and the memory if we scroll down you can see the M2 Pro is a 12 core with eight performance cores and four efficiency cores while the M3 Pro also a 12 core except it has less performance cores and more efficiency ones we'll see in the labs testing if it actually makes a major difference I suspect knowing that it's Apple that it probably doesn't make a huge difference we are moving to tsmc's 3 nanometer process node on the new CPUs so there's going to be an efficiency Improvement I bet you looking at this that they're going to take that Improvement make the laptop be better on battery and perform pretty similarly ALS also we have less memory bandwidth um for most people probably not going to make a big difference for video editing might but also there's a ton of Hardware acceleration on MacBook so maybe less we do have av1 decoding which is great uh no does it not have encoding for av1 yeah okay Bell confirmed no av1 encoding kind of weird you get a little bit more RAM on the same skew so 16 versus 18 gigs compared to the M2 dang this like the same level laptop uh so maybe the next laptop for me is going to be a used M2 Pro for a substantial discount let's try out the speakers I think they're the same they both sound good if you really care that much put headphones in I mean display display looks good is it different I don't think so I didn't see anything different in the specs page so probably not but let's take a look at the labs results and see in terms of brightness on the display we're pretty much right in line with what Apple rates it as for display brightness in SDR we're at 600 nits which is exactly what Apple rates it as and for Peak HDR brightness in xdr mode as Apple calls it we're right at600 nits as rated uh I think we did see ever so slightly higher on a full screen test it looks like it was around 1,00 and Apple only says 1,000 so that's cool they're decently color accurate the P3 gamut coverage is pretty much effectively 100% the average SDR Delta e are around 1.5 average around 3 to 3.5 Max which is decently color accurate although the default HDR mode tends to kind of over brighten what you see uh to give it a bit of more of a Punchy Costco effect but there is a picture mode called PQ 2084 that tracks HDR brightness much more accurately and as with the last generation the local dimming is still some of the best we've seen on pretty much any non OLED display you're looking at 2,000 plus zones on the 14in and then 2500 Plus on the 16in which is really good considering how small that screen is but what about performance H the single threader performance is quite a bit better like in the range of 20% Which is substantial even the non-pro M3 is tracking 20% faster than an M2 Max last time or about 17% faster than the M2 Pro which is pretty substantial moving over to multicore at least in cine bench 2024 the M3 pro picks up 30 plus% on an M2 Pro albeit in a 14-in chassis which is quite substantial that 3 nimer process node is offering some substantial substantial performance here even considering we have less performance more efficiency cores I kind of assumed it was going to be the same but lower power draw um but it seems like it's better and probably lower power draw battery life has expected excels on these new MacBooks we're looking at 24 1/2 hours in our YouTube endurance test on the 16in and around 21 hours on the 14-in that's to be expected because it's a pretty substantially smaller battery in the 14-in chassis for stress test pretty much exactly the same and then the time to full charge is around an hour and a half and an hour and 45 respectively much bigger charger on the 16-in and then a smaller battery on the 14in so those kind of balance each other out to be pretty similar overall after I've looked at some of the other benchmarks it seems like in a fair few situations we quite a bit faster on this new generation which is great it's probably going to be more efficient you're talking a 3 nanometer process node which is quite a bit smaller we have more transistors from the M2 non-pro to the M3 non-pro 20 billion to 25 billion which is a huge increase except confusingly going from the M2 Pro to the M3 Pro we have less 40 billion versus 37 and still it's generally faster one thing that I'm noting out of all of this is the M2 Pro Mac Mini is kind of a superstar it seems most of the time it's like almost as fast so if you're just using this at your desk you might want to look at a Mac Mini from last gen either way faster laptop in most cases battery life still nuts as ever screen still excellent I like the new colors Apple keep doing a good job you make great laptops but they are godamn expensive like seriously how much is this thing I don't even want to look $1,600 for the base spec 14in MacBook Pro if we look at the 16-in MacBook Pro which is what I'm interested in maybe I'm less interested now in 16in land it's $2500 for the Bas speec M3 Pro that's a 12 core CPU 18 core GPU 18 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD you bump up to 36 gigs of RAM like we have and a 1 tbte 3100 with a 512 2900 and if you go for the M3 Max it starts at 3500 USR what's the just humor me what is the most expensive MacBook Pro holy crap that is 7200 H maybe I'll be uh a buying for a new credit card soon if you're interested in more information on these laptops Mac address our Apple channel will have a full review coming very shortly get subscribed like the video God damn why do the nice things have to be so expensive it's just pretty damn\n"