Apple held a special event on Monday evening, showcasing its new M3 chip family that made its way into the refreshed 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMac.
For the M3 Pro and M3 Max configurations, a new exclusive colour option is available: Space Black. This seems like a throwback to the iBook days when Apple had black and white models.
Tech reviewer Brian Tong was at Apple’s hands-on area for select media (not at Apple Park) in New York, and gave a quick hands-on with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 Max chip in Space Black. Tong showed a first-hand look at the device, emphasizing its design, performance, and features. The area lighting indoors at night was pretty terrible, to say the least as it wasn’t as bright as the regular Apple Park demo area. Not sure what Apple was thinking.
“The surface is a new process that Apple has developed that allows you to reduce fingerprints,” said Tong. The Space Black finish is described as a callback to Apple’s matte black iBook and is designed to show fewer fingerprints. The device also feels smoother to the touch compared to previous models.
The M3 Max processor inside the new MacBook Pro features a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU. It introduces an industry-first feature called Dynamic Caching, where local memory is dynamically allocated based on the task at hand. “This significantly increases the performance for the most demanding apps,” Tong noted.
The M3 chip also brings hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing to the Mac for the first time. These features enable the rendering of more visually complex scenes and realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections.
In terms of power efficiency, the M3 chip delivers the same multi-threaded CPU performance as the M1 chip but with just half the power. “This is about power efficiency and up to a 22-hour battery life,” said Tong.
The new MacBook Pro supports up to 128GB of unified memory, a feature previously only available in the Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chip. Port-wise, the device retains the same configuration as its predecessors, including two USB-C ports, a MagSafe 3 connector, an audio connector, an SD card slot, and an HDMI port.
You can see another hands-on with the Space Black MacBook Pro by Matthew Moniz below:
