Apple Announces New M3 Chips, Cuts Price of Entry-Level MacBook Pro

At Apple's 'Scary Fast' event today, the company unveiled a refreshed 24-inch iMac, entry-evel MacBook Pro that ditches the Touch Bar, and its latest 'M3' in-house chips. The Verge reports: As expected, Apple's M3 chips took the spotlight during this month's event. The new lineup includes the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, which Apple says mark the 'first personal computer chips' made using the more efficient 3-nanometer process. In addition to offering a 'faster and more efficient CPU,' the trio of chips comes with an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching -- a feature that optimizes the amount of memory the device uses during tasks. Apple's M3 chips offer up to 128GB of unified memory, with the most powerful M3 Max chip coming with up to 92 billion transistors, a 40-core GPU, and a 16-core CPU.

The new 24-inch iMac is getting an M3-flavored upgrade that Apple says offers two times faster performance than its M1-equipped predecessor. Along with the new chip, the refreshed iMac features a 4.5K Retina display with more than 1 billion colors, support for Wi-Fi 6E, and a 1080p webcam. The iMac also offers up to 24GB of unified memory and comes in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There are also color-matched accessories that come with the iMac, but they still feature Lightning connectors. The 24-inch iMac costs $1,299 with an eight-core CPU or $1,499 with a 10-core chip. You can preorder it starting today, with availability starting on November 7th.

Alongside the M3 Pro and M3 Max-equipped MacBook Pro models, Apple is releasing a cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the base M3 chip and starts at $1,599. The device replaces the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 chip that Apple released last year and offers performance that's up to 60 percent faster. The Touch Bar model is being discontinued, which means it's all physical keys from here out. There are some drawbacks to this entry-level model, though: it features a meager 8GB of RAM and comes in just silver and space gray variations -- the black color is exclusive to the higher-end MacBook Pros. The device is available to preorder today and officially launches on November 7th.

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