Juha Saarinen: Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max packs serious computing punch

The Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max offers heaps of performance at a high price. Photo / Juha Saarinen

OPINION

It’s easy to be blasé about how powerful new computers are, but here I am, typing this column into a sleek black 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with the new M3 Max chipset; it’s a laptop that’s easily the fastest computer I’ve used, and it’s a laptop.

Full Nerdvana maybe, but Apple’s latest MacBook Pro offers desktop workstation performance in a very portable package.

On the outside the MacBook Pro isn’t much different from the earlier generations. You get the three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports with fast up to 40 Gbps data speeds, HDMI for video, SDXC slot for memory cards, and a 3.5 mm audio jack for headphones. Plus the MagSafe 3 fast charging with a black cable that clashes with the white power brick.

Inside though, there’s the new M3 Max system on a chip with unified memory and graphics circuitry. This is made for Apple by TSMC in Taiwan, using a very fine 3-nanometre process for better performance and power efficiency.

The chipset in my review unit is a slightly “detuned” 4.05 GHz 14/30-core CPU/GPU version of the full M3 Max, with a 16-core Neural Engine for artificial intelligence tasks. With that chipset spec, the MacBook Pro M3 Max can be configured with 36 or 96 gigabytes of memory. Mine came with the latter amount.

If those aren’t the right amounts, the full-blown M3 Max with a 16-core/40-core CPU/GPU M3 Max can be configured with 48, 64 or 128 GB of memory. It costs an additional $525.

Going deep geek, the reason for the different RAM sizes is that the full M3 Max version enables another eight memory controllers for 32 in total. Each memory controller can address 4 GB of RAM and the full M3 Max has better bandwidth at 409.6 GB/s compared to 307.2 GB/s, and 1280 additional arithmetic logic units for a total of 5120.

Even so, the MacBook Pro M3 Max review system is very fast. It put in very high numbers in Geekbench 6, Cinebench 2024, and other benchmarks used to rate and compare system performance.

It was quite difficult to push the MacBook Pro M3 Max to the limits in fact. With 96 GB of RAM on board there was never an issue of running low on memory.

The macOS operating system Activity Monitor utility showed the Efficiency or Performance cores - the M3 Max has four of the former and 10 or 12 of the latter - didn’t have to do much work most of the time.

Apple’s idea behind the E and P core chip design is to be energy frugal for better battery life and lower heat output, while having heaps of computing power on standby, and it works well.

For the sake of it, I loaded up the processor cores on the M3 Max fully with a script, and ran benchmarks at the same time. The system remained responsive, and only got lukewarm without the fans starting up.

Should this media gig go sour, I might start offering cloud computing services on the MBP M3 Max for the neighbourhood, as it could cope with it easily.

If by now your eyes have started glazing over at nerdy stats and you wonder who needs all that tech, that’s okay, and the MBP M3 Max isn’t for you.

If on the other hand, you work with video (the MBP M3 Max can run up to four external displays; a single 8K screen at 60 Hz refresh rate is supported), time is money and productivity matters, it’s hard to go past Apple’s latest loaded-up lappie.

High-end gaming, doing AI work, software development and running virtual machines on your laptop as part of a hybrid cloud environment and being very unlikely to run out of steam for the next few years.

What’s more, you can take that computing power and features with you, with a battery that lasts around 20 hours. In that sense, the Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max ticks all the boxes, and I saved this to the end, at a price.

My test system as configured comes to $9249.00 including GST and you can pay more by adding options. Time again to check what the going selling rate for kidneys is in other words.