MacBook Pro 16 inch M3 Pro vs. M3 Max

[JackNL]

I'm in the market for a new 16 inch MBP and deciding between the base 16 inch M3 Pro (12CPU/18GPU/18GB) with a 1TB SSD or the base 16 inch M3 Max (14CU/30GPU/36GB) with standard 1TB. The price difference in The Netherlands is around €800 excluding VAT.

It seems that on Youtube there is no comparison yet between those 2 models so I'm reaching out here.

I'm no creator of video's or creative professional, I do use (call me crazy) 4 browsers at the same time (Safari, Safari Technology Preview, Brave and Arc) and have tens of processor consuming tabs open in each browser.

I lean towards the base 16 inch since it might run longer and cooler, however should I fork out the additional €800 (which I have) and go for the Max.

Does anyone have any experience with the base 16 inch yet?

 

[AVBeatMan]

Not my word but: "I have the M3 pro with 18 GB of ram and 14 core CPU. It is blisteringly fast and handles a multitude of tasks which my old MacBook could never handle: it is particularly good at rendering 3-D video using Final Cut Pro, which I use a lot. The M3 max has more cores and more memory, I believe up to 36 GB. I reviewed both machines carefully and decided it simply wasn't worth the extra cost. By the way, I have the 16 inch screen which is wonderful and allows me to do more work away from my multi screen office. In my opinion, you will be delighted with the M3 pro and I recommend it wholeheartedly."

 

[Kotsos81]

I have the 16 inch M3 Pro 12CPU/18GPU/36GB with 512GB SSD. It is really fast for what I use it for - tens of tabs in Arc, PDF documents, and PowerPoint presentations being open in parallel, a YouTube video playlist playing in the background, and often some computationally-demanding Matlab simulations running on top of all the above. Surely, the extra memory helps when it comes to the simulations, since I deal with large multi-dimensional matrices and large number of variables, and even with the number of tabs being open at the same time, but other than that, I think it is all due to the CPU.

Furthermore, the battery lasts forever (for all practical intents and purposes, that is), the laptop remains cool and silent even under heavy workload, and the screen is a joy to work with!

The M3 Max 14CPU will for sure be significantly faster, but I don't know if there is some use case in your workload that really benefits from this extra speed and, therefore, could justify the extra cost (i.e., scenarios where you will see a difference of tens of minutes instead of a few seconds).

I believe, though, that if multiple tabs across multiple browsers is the most demanding aspect of your workload, M3 Pro 12CPU will ensure super-smooth user experience. If I were you, and since you have the extra cash, I would simply opt for the 36GB variant of the M3 Pro 12CPU instead of going to base M3 Max, which is only a small extra cost compared to the extra cost of the base M3 Max, simply to have some piece of mind, given that multiple tabs running in parallel may require extra memory resources. This would also avoid paging to the SSD, which drops the performance and wares the SSD.

 

[JackNL]

Thanks guys, I bought indeed the (silver) base 12 CPU with 36 GB and it's a joy to use. Runs very cool, even with all the memory consuming tabs open. Could'nt be more happy with it.