The New M3 MacBook Pro Kills the Touchbar

The New M3 MacBook Pro Kills the Touchbar

After 6 years, Apple is finally killing off its infamous Touchbar MacBook Pros with the MacBook Pro M3 series.

It took Apple 6 years to completely give up on the Touchbar, which was introduced back in 2017 with the controversial Butterfly Keyboard that was prone to failure. Apple changed that keyboard to the Magic Keyboard in 2020 but failed to make good use of the Touchbar interface. Starting from the M3 era, all MacBook Pros–including the standard M3 version–will have the same design.

The M3 Pro and M3 Max MacBook Pros get a new Space Black color option for both the 14-inch and 16-inch models–do note that the standard M3 version is only available to the 14-inch model. The new Space Black color has a special coating that makes it resilient against fingerprint smudges.

Similar to the A17 Pro chips found on the iPhone 15 Pro series, the M3 family of processors is based on a 3nm process, with Apple claiming better CPUs and an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching–the latter referring to optimizing the amount of memory used for several tasks. The M3 series of processors supports as much as 128GB RAM, with the top-end M3 Max having a 40-core GPU and a 16-core CPU design.

Aside from those changes, the M3 MacBook Pros have the same set of features as their predecessors: Liquid Retina XDR display, 1080p webcam, 6-speaker system, and up to 22 hours of battery life.

The base M3 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at Php 104,990, while the 16-inch M3 Pro version starts at Php 159,990. Expect the whole line to be available in the Philippines in the coming months.

1 Comment

  • David Dzidzikashvili , November 5, 2023

    Recent Apple release of the 3nm M3 chip with a 40-core CPU will definitely delivers more visible power vs M2 generation and is at the M2 Ultra level of performance. This is a desktop power in a laptop, Apple did it again! With the M3 chip with enhanced GPU/CPU performance, Apple has entered gaming space, and the newer generation Macs will have much better gaming benchmark scores and the overall FPS rates and performance vs prior gen M2 and M1 chips and even v. M3 Macs will close gaming performance gaps vs Windows OS based platforms with RTX 4000 series gaming graphics cards. The M2 generation had already made substantial progress in this regard with the gamers, so M3 with 3nm chip infrastructure has again raised the bar very high.
    There are other performance improvements too that the M3 offers if you are going to perform GPU-demanding tasks such as 3D graphic rendering or modelling, video and audio production, etc. Here too the M3 Max 3nm process is offering higher performance and lower power draw versus N5. Clearly Apple has delivered something out of this world… And wait until M3 Ultra comes out – this will seal the deal!

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