**The Apple M3 Max Chip: A Game-Changer for Professionals**

When it comes to the latest lineup of Apple MacBook Pros, one feature that stands out is the option to upgrade to the M3 Max chip. This added performance core promises significant improvements over the standard M3 chip, and we're here to explore what this means for professionals who need raw power.

The difference between the M3 and M3 Max chips may seem like a small incremental step at first glance, but it's actually a significant jump in terms of capabilities. The minimum RAM requirement for the M3 Max chip is 48GB, which is a substantial increase over the standard M3 chip. This added memory brings with it two additional performance cores and an extra 10 GPU cores, resulting in massive improvements in graphics power.

The increased GPU core count is particularly noteworthy, as this will be a major factor in how well the MacBook Pro handles tasks that require intense computational power, such as video editing and 3D modeling. With the M3 Max chip, memory bandwidth has also increased to 400GB per second, which should provide a significant boost in performance.

One of the most significant upgrades is the option to spec up to 96GB of unified memory for an additional $800 or £800. This may seem like a substantial investment, but for professionals who need every ounce of processing power available, it's well worth considering. The extra memory and performance cores will make a noticeable difference in rendering and playback times, and the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously without sacrificing performance.

For those who are upgrading from an M2 family machine, the added performance of the M3 Max chip may not be enough to justify a new purchase. In this case, sticking with the standard M3 chip should still provide plenty of power for most tasks. However, if you're looking for the absolute best performance and are willing to invest in it, the M3 Max chip is the way to go.

**The Cost: A Significant Investment**

One of the biggest challenges with upgrading to a new MacBook Pro is the cost. The price of the M3 Max chip-equipped model starts at $3,699 or £3,799 for the 14-inch version, which is significantly higher than the standard M3 chip model. This is largely due to the additional memory and performance cores required by the M3 Max chip.

For those who are considering upgrading, it's worth noting that this price point may be out of reach for many consumers. However, if you're a professional who needs every ounce of processing power available, it may be well worth investing in the M3 Max chip.

**The Verdict: Is It Worth It?**

Ultimately, whether or not the M3 Max chip is worth the investment depends on your specific needs and requirements. If you're a creative professional who works primarily with video editing software, the M3 Max chip is an absolute must-have. However, if you're working in more general productivity tasks such as writing, browsing, and office work, the standard M3 chip should still provide plenty of power.

In terms of form factor, there's also something to consider. The 16-inch model with the M3 Pro chip is currently available, but it's only a option for those who need the full fat M3 Pro or the two M3 Max options. This means that if you're looking for the 14-inch form factor, you'll have to choose between the standard M3 chip and one of the M3 Max options.

**The Bottom Line: A Specialized Upgrade**

If you're a professional who needs raw power and is willing to invest in it, the M3 Max chip is an absolute must-have. The added performance cores and memory upgrade make a significant difference in rendering and playback times, and the graphics power is unparalleled. However, if you're on a budget or don't need every ounce of processing power available, sticking with the standard M3 chip should still provide plenty of power.

Ultimately, the decision to upgrade to the M3 Max chip depends on your specific needs and requirements. It's essential to investigate all options carefully and consider whether the added cost is worth it for you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso we've got three new Apple silicon chips with the release of the M3 family I say three there's actually five and uh we've got a new color space black for the MacBook Pro so now you've got three finishes to choose from except you don't and for the first time the MacBook Pro 14in is available with the standard mchip rather than just Pro and Max variants now that is a good thing and also a bad thing so before you trip over yourself in your rush to give Tim Cook your credit card let's take a quick look at the choices available to make sure you don't end up buying the wrong MacBook Pro if you watched Apple's scary fast event then you'll know the highlights we've got a new M3 family of chips the standard M3 the M3 Pro and the M3 Max all built on tsmc's 3 nanometer process and if you don't understand what a 3 nanometer process is basically it means Apple can cram more transistors into the same phys physical space at the same time as improving power efficiency and performance nice Apple claiming around 15% Improvement in CPU performance for M3 over M2 which seems great and it is but it's the same margin of improvement that the M2 delivered over M1 and a lot of tech commentators seem to think that that wasn't enough it'll be interesting to see if they say the same about this chip and it is telling that Apple chose to compare the new M3 chips with the M1 family not the M2 I guess they want to claim the biggest wins but when you look at the various graphs that they showed this may also be because it's not such a huge upgrade over M2 in fact I'd probably say that most folks with an M2 family machine won't feel a massive urge to upgrade unless you desperately need that new space black color and you do need that new space black color the biggest upgrade that the M3 family delivers is in the GPU which just like the new a17 Pro iPhone chip features Apple redesigned Graphics architecture and this has something called Dynamic caching which allows the GPU to better optimize its memory to account the variable power demands in graphics processing uh ultimately this results in better performance and we're also seeing Hardware Ray tracing for the first time on a Mac the demos look great but Apple's graphs are predictably short on meaningful information so we need to hold judgment until we can actually test the chips but it is safe to say that you'll see Graphics Improv mov ments across the whole family of the M chips and of course there are also refinements to the other parts of the system on chip things which help optimize the Mac to allow it to punch above its weight in the areas of video processing and machine learning we're going to dive into more detail on that on the channel soon but for this video let's just focus on the machines starting with the iMac which gets the M3 chip that's a big step up over M1 so great news if you're in the market for an iMac but there's no change to the design size or color options and the keyboard mouse and trackpad still have the lightning Port no USBC here I will be doing a more detailed video on the iMac so if you want to see that you know you need to hit that subscribe and notify button down below so let's switch our Focus to the MacBook Pro now it's still the same great design available in 14in and 16-in sizes and there are three main changes a new entry model a new color and a slightly brighter screen which is now 600 nits for sdl content which matches Apple's Studio display and that's a nice touch but I expect most people won't be able to tell the difference Apple are claiming up to 22 hours battery life but the model that achieves this is the 16-in MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro the 14-in models have smaller batteries and those that have the M3 Max chip will definitely be more power hungry now what about that new color space black it looks great and apple are claiming it will be fingerprint resistant uh which it it will need to be dark aluminium finishes do tend to show up the old finger grease so I'll Reserve judgment on it until I can see it in person but I guarantee this is going to be a huge seller Apple has taken a leaf out of the classic marketing Playbook offer a new color and you'll sell more before you get too excited though the space black finish is only available on MacBook Pro Models with the M3 Pro or Max chips the model with the standard M3 still gets the current space gray finish but of course there's also that silver option let's talk about that entry model which is replacing the 13-in MacBook Pro and it's about time that said it does now mean that entry level model is $1,599 or an inexplicable £699 here in the UK yep despite the exchange rate recovery and the reduction in iPhone prices the MacBook Pro remains a financial kick in the plums for UK buyers so whilst the entry price has increased for consumers it allows Apple to claim that the MacBook Pro 14-in range now starts from a lower price to be fair you are getting more for your money over that old 13-in chassis buyers will get the much better xdr display the better keyboard the better speakers The Wider range of ports and a notch new chip aside though some will see this as being worth the higher cost of Entry alone and it is nice to see that standard storage now starts at 52 GB however despite all the improvements Apple has made to the GPU it's going to be hobbled with the same poultry 8 GB of unified memory as before this is disappointing sure 8 gigs on Apple silicon is fine for everyday general computing but this is a MacBook Pro and we found that if you push the standard M machines you can find the limits of an 8 GB model fairly quickly so you can and should upgrade the RAM to 16 GB uh let's do that and take a look at what happens so I've got the Apple UK website on the left side of the screen and the USA website on the right hand side of the screen we'll do the same thing on both here's our entry level model let's just select that and as standard you can see this comes with 8 GB of unified memory uh taking it up to 16 GB is an extra $200 or £200 and that now pushes our price up to $1,799 or $1,899 here in the UK and the problem with that is that it now means that we only need to pay a further $200 or 00 to get into the M3 pro model or if you spec your standard M3 with 24 gigs of RAM you're basically at the same price as the M3 Pro with 18 gigs of RAM and that will be a significantly better machine sure $200 or 00 is not an insignificant sum of money but as a percentage of the total cost of the machine it's a relatively small jump to go from a 16 gig M3 to an 18 gig M3 Pro like previous families of these chips the M3 3 has an eight core CPU that's four performance cores four efficiency cores and the M3 Pro can have 12 cores six performance six efficiency that's 50% more CPU cores and you will see that performance difference in multi-threaded tasks and pro applications single-threaded performance will be broadly the same across the whole M3 family the M3 Pro can also have an 18 core GPU that's eight more cores than standard M3 and that is going to make a huge difference if you're doing anything like playing games or working on tasks that require graphics acceleration here's another gotcha though there are two versions of the M3 Pro you've got the full fat flavor with those 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU cores and then there's also a bin version with 11 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores and it's the bin version that we've been talking about here as The Next Step Up from the M3 model so with that bin chip you are losing one of those performance cores in the CPU but I'd still expect to see more than 30% multi-threaded improvement over this standard M3 chip and the GPU should be in the order of 40% more performant and perhaps even more because the M3 pro has 50% more memory bandwidth too now as an aside I see that the memory bandwidth on M3 Pro is 150 gigs per second whereas M2 Pro was 200 GB per second so I need to do a bit more of digging on why that's been reduced but there doesn't seem to be any difference in the media engine between M3 Pro and M3 so both chips have got the same video encoders and decoders however when it comes to external displays the standard M3 can only drive one whereas the M3 Pro can drive two external displays there are also differences in the specs of the HDMI port the M3 model is limited to a 4K 120 HZ display but Pro and Max they can do 8K at 60 HZ or 4K at 240 HZ next year of of course the MacBook Air will get the M3 chips and it's going to cost less than the MacBook Pro so the only reason really to go for the M3 MacBook Pro is if you definitely want the form factor or the improved Port selection and better display hello future Dave here sorry for the interruption but there's something that I forgot to mention when I recorded this video and that is that the entry level 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 chip only has two Thunderbolt ports or two type- c ports and they're both on the left hand side of the computer with the pro Max model you get three so there's also one on the right hand side and that means you can charge the laptop from either side of the device you can't do that with the entry level mapbook Pro that's all back to Dave of the past so let's now talk about the pro and Max chips in the previous generations the M1 and M2 family the CPU on these two chips was basically the same the main upgrades going up to Max were the GPU memory bandwidth and the media engine but this time there is a fairly large difference in the CPU between these chips which makes the price hike to the max perhaps seem a bit more sensible so let's look at pricing now for the uh M3 Pro machine and we'll select the full fat flavor of the chip with the 12 core CPU 18 core GPU for an additional $200 or £200 and that brings the price to $2,199 or £ 2,299 now when you look at the specs page here it seems like you can jump up to the max chip for an additional 400 but this isn't quite the case because the M3 Max has an minimum of 36 GB of unified memory so it's actually a jump of $800 or £800 you'll notice on the page that it auto selects the 36 GB memory option and our price is now at $2,999 or $ 3,99 of course we could have specked up our M3 Pro trip with 36 gigs of RAM and then the difference between the two machines does become just $400 or £400 I say just that's actually quite a lot of money so what do you get for that additional spend particularly when we bear in mind that there are two versions of the max chip and the price that we're looking at here is for the bend Max chip with this cheaper chip option you lose two CPU cores and they're both performance cores and you drop 10 of those GPU cores but if we compare that bin Max chip with the full fat Pro chip is it worth that $400 upgrade well if you go up to that bind Max chip you're gaining four performance cores and losing two efficiency cores now that'll be a decent Step Up in multi-threaded performance I'd expect to see around 25% Improvement on average there's also double the memory bandwidth this version of the max chip has 300 GB per second and that will make a difference in memory intensive applications possibly widening the performance gap between these chips and of course you are gaining 12 CPU cores over the pro the differences don't stop there Max has two video encode engines and two prores engines so if you're working with video editing application ations that will make a noticeable difference to rendering and Playback performance and the max chip can support up to four external displays do all of those added features represent a $400 or 400 value for some Pro users I think it will be a no-brainer and with this bin M3 Max chip you can spec up to 96 GB of unified memory for an additional $800 or £800 let's now look though at the difference between this Bend chip to the F fat M3 Max chip and again that seems like it's just another $300 or £300 step up but actually it's 500 because the minimum RAM for this particular chip is 48 GB and again the configurator auto applies that additional upgrade I do think this could be made a little bit clearer on the product configurator page but anyway what are we getting for that additional spend aside from the ram well there's two additional performance cores in the CPU and that might Translate to something like 15 to 20% additional multi-threaded performance and you get another 10 GPU cores and that is a massive upgrade to the graphics power finally memory bandwidth increases to 400 GB per second and now you've also got two more memory options you've got the 64 GB option for 200 or you can go all the way up to a whopping 128 gigs if you're prepared to pay another thousand that's quite the spec but you'll notice that we're still only on 512 GB of storage and if you need more storage you're going to be paying a bit more Apple tax yet best performance usually comes from 2 terab or above but I'd say this spec deserves at least a 1 tbte SSD so let's add that to our MacBook Pro and that brings the price for this ffat M3 Max version of the MacBook Pro with 48 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB drive to $3,699 or an eyering £ 3,799 here in the UK just for comparison when I bought my 14-in MacBook Pro with the M1 Max again I used this standard configuration with a 1 TB drive and I think that was 3,000 so the equivalent laptop in the third generation has gone up by £800 here in the UK that's a significant increase it's a huge amount of money for a laptop but if you've got a professional use case where you can make the most of the performance that's on offer it's actually fairly easy to make a business case to purchase one of these machines but consumers may need to think bit harder before taking the plunge especially if you don't have the workflow to take advantage of the performance and if you want the 16-in form factor you can only have the full fat M3 Pro and the two M3 Max options there's no possibility of a standard M3 so my initial conclusions if you've already got an M2 family machine I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade when it comes to the bass M3 model MacBook Pro if you desperately want the 14-in MacBook Pro form factor go for it otherwise probably better to wait for the M3 MacBook Air if you do decide to go for that 14-in MacBook Pro with the M3 chip I don't think it's worth upgrading it Beyond taking it up to 16 gigs of RAM any further than that and you're better off going for a base M3 Pro instead most creative professionals will be well served by one of the M3 Pro chips if you work specifically in video production or you need the very best in GPU performance then look to the M3 Max instead you do need to investigate all of the options carefully because it's easy to make mistakes and end up with a machine that isn't the best fit for your needs and remember this is Apple there are no upgrades sure you can make use of external storage drives but everything else is solded in and can't be changed after you purchase so if you're spending this much budget a little extra for Apple Care insurance and remember to back up your data regularly because if anything breaks on your MacBook Pro and it's got to go back for repair you'll be losing anything that's stored on it I will say that our web Studio has bought a lot of these MacBook Pros in the M1 and M2 generation and so far they've been extremely reliable actually we've had no Faults with the 14-in and 16-in models but it's probably better safe than sorry so I hope you found this useful please let me know in the comments if you're planning an upgrade what are you going for is that space black finish making your credit card sweat or are you going to skip this generation and wait for the inevitable next best thing thanks as always for supporting the channel and spending some time with me today I'll see you again soon for some more geekso we've got three new Apple silicon chips with the release of the M3 family I say three there's actually five and uh we've got a new color space black for the MacBook Pro so now you've got three finishes to choose from except you don't and for the first time the MacBook Pro 14in is available with the standard mchip rather than just Pro and Max variants now that is a good thing and also a bad thing so before you trip over yourself in your rush to give Tim Cook your credit card let's take a quick look at the choices available to make sure you don't end up buying the wrong MacBook Pro if you watched Apple's scary fast event then you'll know the highlights we've got a new M3 family of chips the standard M3 the M3 Pro and the M3 Max all built on tsmc's 3 nanometer process and if you don't understand what a 3 nanometer process is basically it means Apple can cram more transistors into the same phys physical space at the same time as improving power efficiency and performance nice Apple claiming around 15% Improvement in CPU performance for M3 over M2 which seems great and it is but it's the same margin of improvement that the M2 delivered over M1 and a lot of tech commentators seem to think that that wasn't enough it'll be interesting to see if they say the same about this chip and it is telling that Apple chose to compare the new M3 chips with the M1 family not the M2 I guess they want to claim the biggest wins but when you look at the various graphs that they showed this may also be because it's not such a huge upgrade over M2 in fact I'd probably say that most folks with an M2 family machine won't feel a massive urge to upgrade unless you desperately need that new space black color and you do need that new space black color the biggest upgrade that the M3 family delivers is in the GPU which just like the new a17 Pro iPhone chip features Apple redesigned Graphics architecture and this has something called Dynamic caching which allows the GPU to better optimize its memory to account the variable power demands in graphics processing uh ultimately this results in better performance and we're also seeing Hardware Ray tracing for the first time on a Mac the demos look great but Apple's graphs are predictably short on meaningful information so we need to hold judgment until we can actually test the chips but it is safe to say that you'll see Graphics Improv mov ments across the whole family of the M chips and of course there are also refinements to the other parts of the system on chip things which help optimize the Mac to allow it to punch above its weight in the areas of video processing and machine learning we're going to dive into more detail on that on the channel soon but for this video let's just focus on the machines starting with the iMac which gets the M3 chip that's a big step up over M1 so great news if you're in the market for an iMac but there's no change to the design size or color options and the keyboard mouse and trackpad still have the lightning Port no USBC here I will be doing a more detailed video on the iMac so if you want to see that you know you need to hit that subscribe and notify button down below so let's switch our Focus to the MacBook Pro now it's still the same great design available in 14in and 16-in sizes and there are three main changes a new entry model a new color and a slightly brighter screen which is now 600 nits for sdl content which matches Apple's Studio display and that's a nice touch but I expect most people won't be able to tell the difference Apple are claiming up to 22 hours battery life but the model that achieves this is the 16-in MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro the 14-in models have smaller batteries and those that have the M3 Max chip will definitely be more power hungry now what about that new color space black it looks great and apple are claiming it will be fingerprint resistant uh which it it will need to be dark aluminium finishes do tend to show up the old finger grease so I'll Reserve judgment on it until I can see it in person but I guarantee this is going to be a huge seller Apple has taken a leaf out of the classic marketing Playbook offer a new color and you'll sell more before you get too excited though the space black finish is only available on MacBook Pro Models with the M3 Pro or Max chips the model with the standard M3 still gets the current space gray finish but of course there's also that silver option let's talk about that entry model which is replacing the 13-in MacBook Pro and it's about time that said it does now mean that entry level model is $1,599 or an inexplicable £699 here in the UK yep despite the exchange rate recovery and the reduction in iPhone prices the MacBook Pro remains a financial kick in the plums for UK buyers so whilst the entry price has increased for consumers it allows Apple to claim that the MacBook Pro 14-in range now starts from a lower price to be fair you are getting more for your money over that old 13-in chassis buyers will get the much better xdr display the better keyboard the better speakers The Wider range of ports and a notch new chip aside though some will see this as being worth the higher cost of Entry alone and it is nice to see that standard storage now starts at 52 GB however despite all the improvements Apple has made to the GPU it's going to be hobbled with the same poultry 8 GB of unified memory as before this is disappointing sure 8 gigs on Apple silicon is fine for everyday general computing but this is a MacBook Pro and we found that if you push the standard M machines you can find the limits of an 8 GB model fairly quickly so you can and should upgrade the RAM to 16 GB uh let's do that and take a look at what happens so I've got the Apple UK website on the left side of the screen and the USA website on the right hand side of the screen we'll do the same thing on both here's our entry level model let's just select that and as standard you can see this comes with 8 GB of unified memory uh taking it up to 16 GB is an extra $200 or £200 and that now pushes our price up to $1,799 or $1,899 here in the UK and the problem with that is that it now means that we only need to pay a further $200 or 00 to get into the M3 pro model or if you spec your standard M3 with 24 gigs of RAM you're basically at the same price as the M3 Pro with 18 gigs of RAM and that will be a significantly better machine sure $200 or 00 is not an insignificant sum of money but as a percentage of the total cost of the machine it's a relatively small jump to go from a 16 gig M3 to an 18 gig M3 Pro like previous families of these chips the M3 3 has an eight core CPU that's four performance cores four efficiency cores and the M3 Pro can have 12 cores six performance six efficiency that's 50% more CPU cores and you will see that performance difference in multi-threaded tasks and pro applications single-threaded performance will be broadly the same across the whole M3 family the M3 Pro can also have an 18 core GPU that's eight more cores than standard M3 and that is going to make a huge difference if you're doing anything like playing games or working on tasks that require graphics acceleration here's another gotcha though there are two versions of the M3 Pro you've got the full fat flavor with those 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU cores and then there's also a bin version with 11 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores and it's the bin version that we've been talking about here as The Next Step Up from the M3 model so with that bin chip you are losing one of those performance cores in the CPU but I'd still expect to see more than 30% multi-threaded improvement over this standard M3 chip and the GPU should be in the order of 40% more performant and perhaps even more because the M3 pro has 50% more memory bandwidth too now as an aside I see that the memory bandwidth on M3 Pro is 150 gigs per second whereas M2 Pro was 200 GB per second so I need to do a bit more of digging on why that's been reduced but there doesn't seem to be any difference in the media engine between M3 Pro and M3 so both chips have got the same video encoders and decoders however when it comes to external displays the standard M3 can only drive one whereas the M3 Pro can drive two external displays there are also differences in the specs of the HDMI port the M3 model is limited to a 4K 120 HZ display but Pro and Max they can do 8K at 60 HZ or 4K at 240 HZ next year of of course the MacBook Air will get the M3 chips and it's going to cost less than the MacBook Pro so the only reason really to go for the M3 MacBook Pro is if you definitely want the form factor or the improved Port selection and better display hello future Dave here sorry for the interruption but there's something that I forgot to mention when I recorded this video and that is that the entry level 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 chip only has two Thunderbolt ports or two type- c ports and they're both on the left hand side of the computer with the pro Max model you get three so there's also one on the right hand side and that means you can charge the laptop from either side of the device you can't do that with the entry level mapbook Pro that's all back to Dave of the past so let's now talk about the pro and Max chips in the previous generations the M1 and M2 family the CPU on these two chips was basically the same the main upgrades going up to Max were the GPU memory bandwidth and the media engine but this time there is a fairly large difference in the CPU between these chips which makes the price hike to the max perhaps seem a bit more sensible so let's look at pricing now for the uh M3 Pro machine and we'll select the full fat flavor of the chip with the 12 core CPU 18 core GPU for an additional $200 or £200 and that brings the price to $2,199 or £ 2,299 now when you look at the specs page here it seems like you can jump up to the max chip for an additional 400 but this isn't quite the case because the M3 Max has an minimum of 36 GB of unified memory so it's actually a jump of $800 or £800 you'll notice on the page that it auto selects the 36 GB memory option and our price is now at $2,999 or $ 3,99 of course we could have specked up our M3 Pro trip with 36 gigs of RAM and then the difference between the two machines does become just $400 or £400 I say just that's actually quite a lot of money so what do you get for that additional spend particularly when we bear in mind that there are two versions of the max chip and the price that we're looking at here is for the bend Max chip with this cheaper chip option you lose two CPU cores and they're both performance cores and you drop 10 of those GPU cores but if we compare that bin Max chip with the full fat Pro chip is it worth that $400 upgrade well if you go up to that bind Max chip you're gaining four performance cores and losing two efficiency cores now that'll be a decent Step Up in multi-threaded performance I'd expect to see around 25% Improvement on average there's also double the memory bandwidth this version of the max chip has 300 GB per second and that will make a difference in memory intensive applications possibly widening the performance gap between these chips and of course you are gaining 12 CPU cores over the pro the differences don't stop there Max has two video encode engines and two prores engines so if you're working with video editing application ations that will make a noticeable difference to rendering and Playback performance and the max chip can support up to four external displays do all of those added features represent a $400 or 400 value for some Pro users I think it will be a no-brainer and with this bin M3 Max chip you can spec up to 96 GB of unified memory for an additional $800 or £800 let's now look though at the difference between this Bend chip to the F fat M3 Max chip and again that seems like it's just another $300 or £300 step up but actually it's 500 because the minimum RAM for this particular chip is 48 GB and again the configurator auto applies that additional upgrade I do think this could be made a little bit clearer on the product configurator page but anyway what are we getting for that additional spend aside from the ram well there's two additional performance cores in the CPU and that might Translate to something like 15 to 20% additional multi-threaded performance and you get another 10 GPU cores and that is a massive upgrade to the graphics power finally memory bandwidth increases to 400 GB per second and now you've also got two more memory options you've got the 64 GB option for 200 or you can go all the way up to a whopping 128 gigs if you're prepared to pay another thousand that's quite the spec but you'll notice that we're still only on 512 GB of storage and if you need more storage you're going to be paying a bit more Apple tax yet best performance usually comes from 2 terab or above but I'd say this spec deserves at least a 1 tbte SSD so let's add that to our MacBook Pro and that brings the price for this ffat M3 Max version of the MacBook Pro with 48 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB drive to $3,699 or an eyering £ 3,799 here in the UK just for comparison when I bought my 14-in MacBook Pro with the M1 Max again I used this standard configuration with a 1 TB drive and I think that was 3,000 so the equivalent laptop in the third generation has gone up by £800 here in the UK that's a significant increase it's a huge amount of money for a laptop but if you've got a professional use case where you can make the most of the performance that's on offer it's actually fairly easy to make a business case to purchase one of these machines but consumers may need to think bit harder before taking the plunge especially if you don't have the workflow to take advantage of the performance and if you want the 16-in form factor you can only have the full fat M3 Pro and the two M3 Max options there's no possibility of a standard M3 so my initial conclusions if you've already got an M2 family machine I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade when it comes to the bass M3 model MacBook Pro if you desperately want the 14-in MacBook Pro form factor go for it otherwise probably better to wait for the M3 MacBook Air if you do decide to go for that 14-in MacBook Pro with the M3 chip I don't think it's worth upgrading it Beyond taking it up to 16 gigs of RAM any further than that and you're better off going for a base M3 Pro instead most creative professionals will be well served by one of the M3 Pro chips if you work specifically in video production or you need the very best in GPU performance then look to the M3 Max instead you do need to investigate all of the options carefully because it's easy to make mistakes and end up with a machine that isn't the best fit for your needs and remember this is Apple there are no upgrades sure you can make use of external storage drives but everything else is solded in and can't be changed after you purchase so if you're spending this much budget a little extra for Apple Care insurance and remember to back up your data regularly because if anything breaks on your MacBook Pro and it's got to go back for repair you'll be losing anything that's stored on it I will say that our web Studio has bought a lot of these MacBook Pros in the M1 and M2 generation and so far they've been extremely reliable actually we've had no Faults with the 14-in and 16-in models but it's probably better safe than sorry so I hope you found this useful please let me know in the comments if you're planning an upgrade what are you going for is that space black finish making your credit card sweat or are you going to skip this generation and wait for the inevitable next best thing thanks as always for supporting the channel and spending some time with me today I'll see you again soon for some more geek\n"