Apple announces new MacBooks and iMac with M3 chip; See Pricing
Apple announced the new generation of Macs this evening during the Scary Fast event, which was broadcast via the internet. Also unveiled was the new 24-inch iMac – an “updated” version, according to the manufacturer.
In addition, the Cupertino giant took the opportunity to unveil the M3 chip, with the promise of being the most powerful processor ever produced by the company. It doesn’t hurt to remember: a few years ago, Apple divorced itself from Intel and started designing its own SoCs.
Apple confirmed to Tecnoblog that the products will arrive in Brazil “soon”, without specifying a date.
The M3 Chip Line
The M3 family is made up of three variations: in addition to the base chip, there are the M3 Pro and M3 Max models. Performance can be up to 30% faster than the M2 chip and 50% faster than the M1 chip, when considering the cores designed for energy efficiency. On the other hand, the high-performance cores are 15% higher than the M2.
In common among them is the manufacture with 3-nanometer lithography, the same used in the A17 Pro of the iPhone 15 Pro.
Apple considers that the main differentiator of the M3 family is in the GPU. It features Dynamic Caching, which allocates exact amounts of memory to each task, which should improve gaming performance.
Speaking of games, the M3 is the company’s first chip with ray tracing support, a technology for rendering light rays in games. The promise is 80% faster performance than the M2 in graphics.
The entry-level M3 ushers in the 3rd generation of Apple’s chips. It offers 8 CPU cores. Plus, it’s 10 GPU cores and up to 24GB RAM support.
The M3 Pro has 12 CPU cores, 18 GPU cores, and support for up to 36GB of unified memory. Finally, the M3 Max has 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and up to 128GB of memory.
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic, and Apple has paid special attention to it. According to the company, the new Neural Engine is up to 60% faster than that of the M1 family, which should help with tasks such as noise reduction in images and automatic detection of scenes for editing.
The three chips in the M3 family also come with a media engine, which provides hardware acceleration for video codecs such as H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW.
With the same design as the last generation, Apple announced several new MacBook Pro models. They have a 14-inch or 16-inch screen. The main difference has to do with the chip inside the notebook: users will be able to choose between the three models presented today.
Take the 2023 MacBook Pro with 14 inches as an example. According to Apple, the performance when applying filters and performing image processing is 40% higher than that seen in MacBooks with an M1 chip. It is suitable for students, entrepreneurs, and creators.
The 24-inch iMac all-in-one computer has gotten an upgrade and will now be powered by the M3 chip. Apple claims that it offers twice the speed of the previous model, which came with the M1 chip. The company also says that the performance jump is 2.5 times over the most popular 27-inch iMac with an Intel processor.
The new version of the iMac remains with the design and specifications it had before. It has a 4.5K resolution screen and has a Full HD (1080p) webcam.
