Review: Apple’s 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro crams Ultra-level speed into a laptop

The next year or two will be a turning point for people who bought into the last few generations of Intel Macs. AppleCare+ subscriptions will expire, batteries will begin to lose a noticeable amount of capacity, software updates and security fixes will gradually dry up, and normal wear and tear will slowly take its toll.

Every new generation of Apple Silicon Mac is another opportunity for Apple to get those people to update, which may or may not help to explain why Apple is introducing its new M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max MacBook Pros fewer than 11 months after releasing the M2 versions.

Like the early 2023 MacBook Pros, these late 2023 models are iterative improvements to the 2021 redesigns. They keep the things that made those laptops such a big improvement over the late-model Intel MacBook Pros while adding just a little more performance and one or two other minor improvements to entice people who still haven't made the Apple Silicon switch.

We can only paint a partial picture of these new notebooks' performance since we were only able to get a fully loaded M3 Max version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro for testing. But the short version is that two years of updates and the brand-new, more-efficient manufacturing process that the M3 uses should make these an appealing upgrade to anyone who couldn't quite justify paying for an upgrade before now. Just get ready to shell out because top-end MacBook Pro configurations are more expensive than ever, thanks to the new 128GB RAM option.