Ars Technica reviews 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro: ‘Wouldn’t be possible with Intel’

16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro in Space Black
Apple’s revolutionary 16‑inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max delivers performance and capabilities that push the limits of computing. With a monster GPU and a powerful CPU, along with support for up to 128GB of unified memory, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max enables extreme workflows and multitasking across pro apps for users like machine learning programmers, 3D artists, and video editors.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
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The Apple Silicon-era refresh of these systems undoes all of the worst things about the 2016-to-2020 era of Mac design.
It’s notably heavier and marginally larger—between 4.7 and 4.8 pounds, up from 4.3 from the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pros—but there’s no Touch Bar and no butterfly keyboard, you get your MagSafe port and an HDMI port and SD card reader back, and Apple Silicon provides a solid boost to performance and battery life while running cooler and quieter than the Intel and AMD hardware Apple used to use. The high-refresh-rate, HDR-capable ProMotion screen also makes a big difference—the notch remains a strange design compromise, and the strips of screen to either side of it remain under-utilized by macOS, but you do gradually get used to ignoring it.

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MacDailyNews Take: The MacBook notch is Apple’s design team saying, “Hey, we can suck at design, too! We can add pointless justifications for bad design choices in other product families that no longer apply, but we’ll keep on shipping them anyway!”
The notch was bad on the iPhone (pre-Dynamic Island), but you could see the reasoning (“we can’t figure out how to do it and we don’t have Steve here to push us to do it). On a MacBook, it’s simply putrid and stupid.

Our Apple-provided review unit is a 16-inch model with a fully enabled M3 Max; it has 12 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 40-core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Single-core performance is up between 14 and 19 percent compared to the M2 Max and by 25 to 32 percent compared to 2021’s M1 Max. The added cores mean that multi-core performance increases even more—the M3 Max is between 14 and 42 percent faster than the M2 Max and from 71 to 93 percent faster than the M1 Max in our tests.
Graphics performance also sees a solid boost, more than you’d expect from just a pair of extra GPU cores. The M3 Max benchmarks around 50 percent faster than the M1 Max…
Moving past Mac-on-Mac comparisons, comparing the M3 Max to current high-end PC chips paints an even more impressive picture of its performance and efficiency… The M3 Max chips can get pretty close to the single- and multi-core performance of high-end desktop PC chips like the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Intel Core i9-14900K, which is seriously impressive given that the M3 Max can fit into a laptop, and those are both top-tier consumer desktop chips that are drawing huge amounts of power and generating large amounts of heat…
Switching to its own chips continues to pay dividends for Apple.

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MacDailyNews Take: The 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro is quite simply the world’s more powerful laptop computer – by a wide margin (yes, it’s more than a “notch above”).
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