Apple kept its Scary Fast October 30 event short and sweet. It timed out at about half a hour, which we were grateful for given the unorthodox start time of midnight UK time.
However, Apple packed plenty into that 30 minutes with the announcement of the M3 series of processors, MacBook Pro models to house them and the long-awaited iMac refresh.
Let’s delve in, and also point you in the direction of our detailed reports and comparisons between the new chips.
The era of M3 is here
Many worried the M3 wouldn’t land until 2024, but Apple delivered on Halloween Eve. The Scary Fast event saw the launch of the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max processors. While there are big CPU performance gains within the 3nm processors, the graphical improvements are the headline makers with Apple really making its pitch to gamers with features like hardware-based ray tracing and mesh shading coming to Mac for the first time. The Dynamic Caching feature sounds really useful too.
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New MacBook Pro models
The Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch have been M3’d up. You can get both size configurations with M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max. They start at a new low price of $1,599/£1,699. The top model now supports up to 128GB of RAM! The Liquid Retina XDR display is now brighter than before too. And, in the M3 Pro and M3 Max configurations you’ll be able to get it in a lovely new shade of Space Black.
New iMac 24-inch with M3
It’s been almost three years since Apple debuted the redesigned iMac 24-inch, so this was definitely due an update. Apple delivered by plonking its standard M3 chip within the popular desktop all-in-one.
It’s now 2x faster than the M1 models and is available to buy from November 7 from $1,299/£1,399 with pre-orders now live. Here’s all you need to know about the iMac 24-inch with M3 (2023).
There are no M3 Pro and M3 Max models. They’ll likely arrive if Apple ever launches the rumoured iMac Pro.
What’s Apple didn’t announce
That’s was about everything. Attention now turns to the wider rollout of M3 on other Mac and iPad products. We’re likely to see updated MacBook Air and iPad Pro models in 2024.
Rumours of a new high-powered Apple TV with graphical improvements were unfounded for now, while we’re also waiting on updates to the AirPods range. Let the perennial Apple rumour mill begin churning all over again.
