MacBook Pro 14 M3

But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades. Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works. When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.

[...] That compares reasonably well with my 14" M3 Macbook Pro, which seems to be drawing around 3.5 W with a similar set of apps open. Sure, the XPS is flattered in this comparison because it has a slightly smaller screen, but even accounting for that it would still be... [...]

[...] The only time I've ever heard automatic fans was when I was using a local 12B model on the M3 MacBook Pro, and when running 70B models on the Studio. [...]

I have a Framework 13 that I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro. [...] I'm a long-time Mac user, but I increasingly found myself alienated by locked-down hardware and increasingly locked-down software, and so I ended up switching back to PCs. [...] With that said, my M3 MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life. By comparison, my Framework 13 has rather abysmal battery life by 2025 standards. [...] Even putting my Framework 13 to sleep drains the battery after a few hours, while on my MacBook Pro, it barely sips from the battery. I hope future releases of Framework laptops have better battery life; it makes a difference.

My “fancy” Windows work laptop has 45 minutes of battery life, while my M3 MacBook Pro will go 14 hours compiling C++ or running JavaScript and Docker images, and do so twice as fast as my work laptop could. I’d say you get what you pay for, but my work laptop was around the same price as my M3. [...]

Not that I expect them to fix it at this point since it seems to be a known issue, but just in case anyone from Notion is watching please fix the macOS app’s CPU usage. On a brand new M3 MacBook Pro each tab takes about 10% of one core non-stop even in the background. I have to constantly cull tabs or my machine becomes noticeably less responsive.

[...] I get 8 hours if I'm lucky on my work laptop, but I have attributed most of that battery loss to all the "protection" software they put on my work laptop that is always showing up under the "Apps Using Significant Power" category in the battery dropdown. I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles. I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! [...] I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery. [...] Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.

I'm still very bummed with Apple's strategy in using of supported external displays as a feature to gate laptops. I had to return a decently spec-ced M3 Macbook PRO 14" because it only supported 1 display (base M3) and pay more for M3 pro even though I don't need the extra horsepower. And now the base M3 Air's support 2 displays? [...]

[...] Why do I need to buy the top of the line M3 MacBook Pro to run these apps with a sane performance? What kind of future super computer do I need to run NATIVE Xcode with sane performance? Why NATIVE email client drops frames on scrolling thousand long email list while I can scroll Amazon web page forever without perceived frame drops? Why opening NATIVE settings redesign on Mac OS stutters harder on my MBP 2018 than settings my shitty HTC from 2012? [...]

[...] A shame that they did not fix the clamshell mode on the basic M3 Macbook Pro yet. [...]

[...] M3 MacBook Pro 16" is $2499, roughly the same as an equivalent Dell XPS / Precision laptop (for the same price Dell typically has half the screen resolution, much worse battery life, and more RAM) Divide $2499 over five years, that's $500 per year. Not expensive on a developer salary in high income countries. [...]

Unironically, yes. My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.

[...] My m3 MacBook pro is a million times more powerful dev machine than a cheap $5 vps. [...]

Yeah it feels slow and laggy to me too and I'm not on an old laptop. Running on a M3 Macbook Pro here. I definitely notice the difference between using something like Ghostty (Rust based - super fast) and Toad (Python).

I concur. I have a Framework 13 I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro. While I love the freedom that my Framework 13 provides in terms of user serviceability and operating system choice, the MacBook Pro feels more premium, and it has absolutely amazing battery life.

[...] My M3 MacBook Pro just works. [...] My iPad Mini 6 just works. [...]

I have a different problem with my M3 Macbook Pro. If I leave chrome (sometimes other apps too) open with the macbook plugged in and the lid closed the computer will get very warm and stay very warm until I unplug it / close chrome. Edit: It's also not warm when plugged in and using chrome with the lid open.

This is the only use case I have for the Apple Vision Pro, and it works quite well for that, paired with my 16" M3 Macbook Pro.

[...] My main computer is an M3 Macbook Pro. [...]

We must be thinking about very different types of games, because even though I’m completely bought into the Apple ecosystem and love my M3 macbook pro and mac mini, I have a windows gaming PC sitting in the corner because very few titles I’d want to play are available on the mac.

[...] Compared to my M2 MacBook Air or my work M3 MacBook Pro. [...]

[...] Currently on llama3.2 text-only 3B, running on an M3 Macbook Pro. [...] I'd also like it to be better at inferring partial context from audio transcriptions. But hey, it's an open source 2GB model running on my laptop, it'll get better.

My work machine is an M3 Macbook Pro. I put it to sleep on a Friday, and after a three-day weekend, it's still ready to go on Tuesday with 95% of battery left. [...] I have yet to own a newer Intel laptop that can sleep for more than 24 hours without almost completely draining the battery.

[...] Dev machines are all M1/M3 MacBook Pros and we deploy to a mix of x64 and Arm64 instances on GCP and AWS. [...]

[...] For any actually decent laptop designed for enterprises/businesses, this is not true, they still have steel hinge pins and plastic-over-metal hinge bodies. [...] I have an X230 laptop I bought new in 2012 that is still in use weekly and functions completely fine. My much newer M3 Macbook Pro is significantly more powerful, but is completely unnecessary for what that laptop is for. That's 12 years of usage without any sign of slowing down, and since that X230 is my car laptop I use in my race car for tuning and data monitoring, I can guarantee it's had a lot worse than "3-4 drops" over the last 12 years, including surviving a crash in my old race car.

the only thing you can compete on is how many parameters it takes and how cheaply you can serve that to users. [...] In order for proprietary models served through an API to compete long term they need to offer significant performance improvements over open/local offerings, but that gap has been perpetually shrinking. On an M3 macbook pro you can run open models easily for free that perform close enough to OpenAI that I can use them as my primary LLM for effectively free with complete privacy and lots of room for improvement if I want to dive into the details. Ollama today is pretty much easier to install than just logging into ChatGPT and the performance feels a bit more responsive for most tasks. [...] Honestly can't understand any serious software engineer who wouldn't use open models (again the control and tooling provided is just so much better), and for less technical users it's getting easier and easier to just run open models locally.

Exactly ... I love my almost maxed out m3 macbook pro but if I can get one of these fast arm chips in a laptop with thinkpad level linux support I'd insta-buy yet another laptop.

Honestly only reason I want a studio is because I run several monitors and my Mac Mini can’t run all my monitors unless I use displaylink, which doesn’t allow me to run any HDCP protected content and is just glitchy and hacky in general. [...] But that’s not really the point, the point is that I don’t want to spend $4k to buy a Mac Studio with an M2 chip while the M3 Macbook Pro has on par performance and the iPad has an M4. Apple should come up with a better update strategy then randomly updating devices based on previous update cycles.

I bought a used thinkpad x13 for 350 bucks. It won me over from my m3 MacBook Pro that costs 4 times as much

Anecdote: I recently received a new M3 MacBook Pro at work, and the box was 100% recyclable, as well as everything inside of it - instruction manuals (why?) were held together with paper, the power cord had paper around it, and the keyboard/screen separator was also tissue paper. [...]

I recently got a m3 macbook pro (mainly because the general notebook market has been shit for a decade now, I needed to replace my more than a decade old one, and there's pretty much nothing apart from apple which is relatively small, has long battery life, a shitload of RAM and a powerful CPU). Once there's Linux support for M3 I'll probably switch (have an M1 macbook air with Linux which is doing well) - until then I got things close enough to my Linux Hyprland setup with yabai that it is relatively painfree to use.

[...] If you asked me to choose between a regular M3 MacBook Pro and a full DeX phone based docking setup built around a top-line smartphone, I’m going to pick the MacBook’s 4x more RAM, 3x bigger CPU, 6x bigger GPU, and much better thermal dissipation. [...]

I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. [...] I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. [...]

Why do I need to buy the top of the line M3 MacBook Pro to run these apps with a sane performance? Bad software performs badly.

On an M3 MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM, I can comfortably run 34B models like phind-codellama:34b-v2-q80. Unfortunately, having tried this and a bunch of other models, they are all toys compared to GPT-4.

Part of my decided to get the M3 MacBook Pro because I wouldn't be able to game on it so much - I needed something reliable for a Cybersecurity Masters and I knew if I got a powerful windows laptop I would be tempted to play games . My is a lovely machine for the most part but overheats a lot when gaming, so much so that it worries me. So I don't bother.

[...] It's tooling agnostic and there are a couple ways to generate them, but the easiest it to just use pants build. [...] Edit: just ran it on a hello world with py3.14 on m3 macbook pro, about 100 +/-30 ms for python -m hello and 300-400 (but wild variance) for executing the pex with ./hello/binary.pex. [...] Pex is honestly best when you want to build and distribute an application as a single file (there are flags to bundle the python interpreter too). [...]

[...] On the other hand, iPadOS 26 is the best update since the iPad was released. [...] I have an M2 MacBook Air and work M3 MacBook Pro

I honestly do not know if I have any screen that supports HDR. At least I've never noticed any improved image quality when viewing HDR video content and compare the image on my M3 Macbook Pro screen vs. [...] Maybe my eyes are just broken?

While I don't have a 2013 Mac anymore, I do have both an M3 MacBook Pro, and a Ryzen 5 Lenovo for development work with different clients and I really don't find the Mac that much faster in day to day usage. Sure in benchmarks it gets bigger numbers, but in normal usage it's negligible. That's probably more due to MacOS getting less efficient than anything else though.

I have a Macbook Pro 14 M3, I do hobby photography and you can get great laptop with excellent color accuracy with better screen than Macbook Pro out of the box, from Asus or Lenovo. There are Yoga Pro 9i, yoga aura Edition and even newer Ideapad pro has OLED options ranging from 2.3k to 4k resolution 1000 nits peak bright, depending on config, factory calibrated which is quite close. I got one from Lenovo with OLED, came pre-calibrated, running X-Rite calibration gave minimal gains.

[...] Compared to my M2 MacBook Air or my work M3 MacBook Pro. [...] You might say that the battery life is part of UX, so, sure, I get that, but while, in practice, battery life on the M1/M2/M3/M4 is superior, as a trade-off the user gets a limited set of software that they can run, which is also part of the UX. [...]

[...] Timings taken on an M3 Macbook pro with 16 gb RAM using the /usr/bin/time command. Input value of 40 given to each. [...]

Sounds like the new ringtone. [...] Me: M3 Macbook Pro owner with an Android phone. [...]

Hm, the M3 MacBook Pro had a 96GB of ram model (which is what I have). I wonder why it's not an option with the M4.

[...] I also use Ollama on my M3 MacBook Pro. [...]

[...] But to answer your question I have a 128GB of RAM in my M3 MacBook Pro, so I can use most of that for GPU inferencing. [...] But with quants that small I'd expect the model's performance to degrade well below that of Mixtral, so it probably isn't really even worth using. [...]

I'd take you mean a M3 MacBook Pro laptop, because M3 Mac Pro is not available yet... [...] So, assuming I am scientist from 1961 that just have given clearance by CIA to examine an unusual object that looks like a typewriter with a flat screen. [...] - QWERTY keyboard indicates it is some sort of the typewriter, some symbols like ⌘ are a bit mysterious, but otherwise the purpose of that part is clear enough. - There is also rectangular depression below the keyboard, covered with something that seems like glass. [...] - Careful examination reveals a 3.5mm audio jack, so 1960s headphones can be also connected without problem, is this some sort of the portable radio? [...] - The display is the most puzzling piece of equipment. It suggests a function of a TV screen but without the usual bulk of the CRT equipment. [...] - You find a button that makes the display light up and animate. The screen is now covered with variety of large glyphs on the bottom, a row of text labels and smaller glyphs o