MacBook Pro M3 Pro After 3 Months: Why It's Not What You Expected

this is the M3 Pro MacBook Pro and after using this for 3 months or so I think this is one of the most misunderstood products in Apple's lineup and for good reason when you compare it to the previous generation there seems to be a combination of upgrades and downgrades looking at features and specs which in itself can be super confusing but then when you add in real world use a lot of those things are less important than they might seem this is led to a whole bunch of opinions and questions surrounding what this machine can or can't do and today I'm I'm going to do my best to debunk and clear a bunch of this stuff up what's important to consider what's not and just my general thoughts on the M3 Pro after using it every day so if you want to know more about the newest MacBook maybe have unanswered questions or concerns or you're just curious about what my long-term experience has been like stick around and let's get into [Music] it hey everyone Kyle Erikson here I bought the M3 Pro MacBook as soon as it was announced at the end of October and at that time it was mainly just going to be a review unit for the channel previously I had the M2 Max Mac Studio that I did all my work from that I was really happy with and by no means was I expecting the M3 Pro MacBook to keep up with it but with everything that I do personally the experience is very much the same enough so that I decided to just go all in on the M3 Pro doing that has some obvious immediate advantages I use this a lot at my desk but there are times when it gets a bit stale in here and I want to work some somewhere else or if I'm not at home and I want to get something done it's nice to have the portability without having to have two separate machines the model I have here is the 14-in version which I much prefer over the larger 16-in model I used to travel a lot with the 16-in M1 Pro and I always found it to be more of a pain to haul around with me so ever since then I've tried to stick with the 14s the one that I have here is the allnew space black color which has been great it doesn't show fingerprints nearly as much as some other dark color like midnight in the MacBook Air and I don't have any scratches anywhere including the high contact areas like the edges of the ports I do connect and disconnect to the USB ports quite a bit but they still look good as new it does show dust a lot easier than the lighter models so I do find myself cleaning it more but other than that I'm really happy with how the finish is holding up that's probably the biggest change visually with this generation the screen does get 100 nits brighter than the M2 Pro in SDR content but it's not something that's really noticeable and otherwise things are relatively the same as the last two versions it's really inside the machine where all the differences lie and where things get interesting the MacBook that I have here is the bass pro model with an 11 core CPU 14 core GPU 52 gigs of storage and 18 gigs of RAM and unlike the last two generations of Apple silicon that were built on a 5 nanometer process the M3 is 3 NM which is something that I was really curious about that process essentially means that that the components within the M3 chip are much smaller which can lead to gains in efficiency and battery life initially when I reviewed this the battery didn't feel that much different than the M2 Pro and it took a while to get a sense for how much better this has been but there has been a considerable difference in battery life over the M2 Pro if I'm browsing the web or using this very lightly I can get just under 16 hours on a single charge and ramping up the use to include things like video editing and coding it'll drop down to about 10 or so with the screen brightness at around 50 to 60% comparing that to my old M2 Pro that's about a 20 to 30% increase in overall battery life give or take depending on how you're using the MacBook which is outstanding now I use this a ton at my desk and sometimes it might be a week or more where I'll leave this plugged into power and some folks have expressed concerns regarding having this constantly connected to power and if it's degrading the battery and that has zero effect on battery health that was a pretty big problem in Mac Mac OS I want to say pree Big Sir or Catalina somewhere in there where like most Electronics if you left your battery plugged in it would decrease the lifespan dramatically I completely killed the battery on an old Intel Mac in about a year of it being brand new doing that but Apple has gotten really good with recognizing when you leave your device plugged in all the time and will hold charging and optimize power based on that there's also a couple other questions I frequently get related to power using the M3 Pro as a desktop machine one is how I turn my MacBook on when it's in a vertical stand without hitting the power button and the answer is I don't I just have it go to sleep and I rarely ever shut it down which is the way to go if you have a vertical stand like this otherwise I don't think that there is an option to turn it on without opening it if you do know something that'll work there feel free to pop a comment down below but the other question that I get is a bit more complex and I do have a solution for and that's to do with external storage so one of the reasons why I usually go with the base storage option in my Max is that I run external ssds on a lot of my machines that way I don't have to Fork out1 more to Apple for internal storage and then I can just swap these drives out as needed I've made multiple videos on how to do that that'll Link in the description but one of the issues that I've noticed popping up from a lot of people trying to run a similar setup is their external drive ends up unmounting or disconnecting when their Mac goes to sleep essentially what's happening there most of the time is the power output is reduced on your USB ports when it goes to sleep and it's not enough to run the drive so it just stops working and disconnects itself but there are ways that you can address that on Mac OS if you go into your settings under battery you'll see an option there to put hard diss to sleep you can play around with that to see if that helps but what I always do that in most cases should work is have your drives hooked up to a powered Hub or a dock ver just directly into your Mac that way they'll always have sufficient power and you don't get any of those issues when it comes to that 512 gig internal drive that's much faster than the one in the M2 Pro with about 5 to 15% faster R speeds and up to about 95% faster read times but it's also one of those specs that you don't really notice in the real world even the bass M2 MacBook Air has a much slower speed than this and feels almost indistinguishable most of the time and the same could be said for memory band with this well the M1 Pro and M2 Pro both have a 200 GB second memory bandwidth which is insanely fast but they Dro that down to 150 in the M3 Pro that seems like it should be a hit to Performance with only 3/4 of the bandwidth but honestly you're never going to notice if you go build a high-end PC right now those max out at just below 90 GB per second so anything 100 and above which all M series chips have is fantastic like I said this is the base model so it comes with 18 gigs of ram my workflow is somewhat demanding but by no means crazy and it runs everything that I do here completely fine with no issues most of the time I can't tell the difference between this and my old M2 Max Max studio but there are a couple of scenarios where the drop from 32 gigs of RAM to 18 does come into play one being Lightroom I use Lightroom mostly for editing thumbnails and Instagram photos but just opening that up on its own and editing a raw photo from my a74 uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 gigs of RAM or so it still runs completely fine and I don't notice any slowness in Lightroom alone but the problem that I have is I almost always have a bunch of other apps open at the same time like Affinity photo that I kind of use in tandem with Lightroom when I edit thumbnails and usually if I'm editing thumbnails there's a good chance I'll have final cut open to so I usually just end up closing some of that stuff down so I don't have a bunch of memory pressure on my system the other place I see this come into play from time to time is editing videos If I have a ton of effects laid over a single clip I've mentioned this on the channel before but it can tend to slow down on you a lot if you have too much going on but it's really not all that big of a deal if it ever does feel sluggish I'll just render out a specific area of the video and it solves my issues just keep in mind that I'm by no means doing anything crazy there aren't a lot of resource heavy Motion Graphics basically just 4K Clips with color grading and some audio plugins and whatnot for the most part if you're getting into some heavier workflows or production level 3D effects or visuals bumping up is probably a good idea the biggest slowdown that I noticed coming from the max chip to the pro has nothing to do with the ram but the rendering engine where the pro has a single encoding engine and the Max has two it's still fairly quick but it might take me 15 or 20 minutes to render out a 12 to 15 minute video on the M3 Pro where the M2 Max would take about 10 to 12 minutes sometimes when I'm impatient I miss that speed but the majority of the time I just have that running in the background but I can see where on larger projects that are hours long that might be a pain the actual CPU itself is more than enough for what I need and has been great this is the model with 11 cores five of which are performance cores and the other six are efficiency while that might initially appear as a step back from the M2 Pro based model which had six performance cores the M3 Pro still comes out on top in almost every metric but I should caution folks who work in audio a lot I've seen a lot of info out there stating that most dos can't effectively use the efficiency cores in only run on performance cores leading to worse performance so if you work a lot with audio tools that might be something that you want to consider but I'm honestly not the one that you want to listen to there as I don't really use those tools a ton but I think it's worth noting I'm more living in apps that are GPU heavy and when it comes to the GPU that's one area that I was really surprised with this has a 14 core GPU so down from 16 in the last generation but it absolutely smokes it in overall performance I said this last week when I reviewed the Samsung s24 Ultra but tons of gpus in different devices this year are seeing huge gains in performance with the addition of Hardware enabled R tracing which is included in all the M3 chips this year whether that's the base chip the pro or the Max and provided that you're working in apps that are optimized for it the GPU is much more performant in blender it puts up similar performance to my old 30 core GPU in the M2 Max Max studio which is kind of wild and for what I do here it's been super smooth again I'm not doing any kind of professional 3D work or working in an animation studio and if you're doing that you're probably going to want a much more powerful machine than this but just for simple projects of learning the Bas M3 Pro chip works really well just in general performance- wise I have nothing to complain about but there is a couple things that I want to clear up there seems to be some uncertainty around the speakers in the M3 Pro being worse than the previous generation and that is technically true the M2 Pro MacBook doesn't get quite as loud as the M3 Pro but it does have a touch wider frequency response but again the difference is so minimal that unless you have them sitting side by side I doubt you're ever going to notice the sound quality is amazing probably still one of the best that you're going to find in a laptop but if you shift that to a Bluetooth connected audio device and just speaking to wireless connectivity in general that's a different story now Bluetooth works totally fine in terms of speed stable connection all that stuff but I find the range is pretty terrible I know that if you've got wireless headphones on and you're working at your laptop you're likely not going to go far but for me if I have my airpods in at my desk and I go to grab a coffee these cut out more easily than pretty much every other machine that I've had connected in this space it's not a deal breaker it's just more of an annoyance but if my mobile devices have a much better range Apple should be able to figure out a way to make it much better on the MacBook all in all there's very few things that I don't like about the M3 Pro MacBook and I honestly don't regret moving to it from the Mac Studio at all it's super performant battery life is great and it's just an all-around great machine I do think that people get a little bit carried away with how much RAM they think they need 18 in my case has worked quite well and especially if you stick with things like productivity graphic design coding that kind of thing 18 is more than enough if you're doing more resource heavy creative stuff with video or Motion Graphics you can still get pretty far with gist 18 but if you're getting into beefier projects with sfx 3D or you just want to have a thousand things open at once it's probably in your best interest to bump things up a little bit specs wise for me I'm going to continue using this I'm assuming until maybe the next iteration of the studio is released and if you guys would like to see any other Macs reviewed on the Channel that I haven't covered yet let me know in the comments down below that's it for me today I hope you enjoyed this video or you found it useful if you did feel free to hit that like button if you want 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Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 229,151

Keywords: macbook pro m3 pro, macbook pro m3, macbook pro 2023, macbook pro, m3 pro macbook pro, m3 pro macbook pro review, m3 macbook pro, space black macbook pro, m3 pro, macbook pro long term review, macbook pro 14, m3 pro macbook pro 14, 14 inch macbook pro, macbook pro 14 inch, apple macbook pro m3 pro, m3 pro vs m2 pro, macbook pro vs mac studio, mac studio vs macbook pro, m3 macbook pro review, best m3 macbook

Id: Yb44Kl_YFes

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024