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.