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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro M3

91owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
48/24positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and battery; criticized for display and noise.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 3 years
I mean we are talking about the "Pro" machine. I think there is likely an argument to be made that if you are not doing a task that would genuinely improve with more powerful hardware do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks. I do think there is still some ideas of the pro vs the Air that we are still stuck with from the Intel days. Is that threshold for using a Pro machine 3 years, I don't know probably not for most people. My M3 Pro from almost 3 years ago is still running beautifully. I could make the argument that more power would benefit what I do with this machine without a doubt, is it worth the upgrade? I don't know, but I would be lying if I have not been thinking about it. But I also think about the mentality I had when I bought this machine, and the mentality I had when I was looking at possible upgrades just a few weeks ago. Possibly paying more to overspec the machine compared to my current use case assuming that I want to continue to use it in 3 to 4 years. I don't know if that calculation is necessary as cut as dry.
Likes itOwned 1.5 years
I've used one of the flagship Surface Books two jobs ago, really beefy, could run Cyberpunk(don't ask how I know). Insanely bad machine, the overall finish was terrible, hinges broke often, charging port broke often(like every 3rd-4th person in the office), it overheated with basic office work, fans went rocket level loud when compiling basic things, after a while it was stuttering even with casual use. Had a really good Dell XPS at home too that was dying when compiling big Typescript codebase. I bought an MBP M3Pro 1.5y ago and I could never go back. It's insane how far ahead Apple is when it comes to performance. Noone seems to grasp that until they actually try to work on M-series. Three of my ex colleagues also switched to Macbooks after I told them, they also are never coming back.
Likes itOwned 1 year
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.
Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
Only if Apple provides a stream of clean microfibre cloths and someone to lay it out for me and close the laptop with care. Otherwise they'd better lay off the drugs that generated that thinness fetish and make sturdy devices again. (Note that i don't see any button traces on my m3 mbpro yet. it's close to a year old. And I'm not the kind that keeps the tv remote in the plastic bag that it was delivered in, probably the opposite.)
Likes it
Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead
Neutral
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
Neutral
I use an M3 mbp with corporate crap like Windows Defender on it. Two cores are maxed out all day, so if I do anything else intensive it goes up to 80 C and turns on the "vacuum" fan. Still, most of the time it's absolutely quiet (barely audible, and I'm someone who really hates laptop fan noise!), and the machine doesn't get more than lukewarm. With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
Doesn’t like it
I left Firefox for the first time since... well, I _think_ I used it before it was Firefox. This self-imposed exile only lasted a couple months. I left looking for low-friction answers to my need to organize tabs and content. I didn't love giving up control to some central organization to process my data, but I had promised myself I'd write one or two extensions to answer my needs "next week" for years. After doing some research, most of what I wanted already exists. Sidebery, Tab Wrangler and the new Agents window (with some styling to eliminate the default tab list), together with my other old friends like uBlock Origin, Auto Tab Discard (suspend) and a number of container-related extensions, deliver the same functionality I found elsewhere, without taking control from me. Plus, this is just me, but chromium-based browsers manage to get my m3 pro macbook with 36GB RAM hot pretty consistently with normal use. I noticed the moment I left Firefox. And I noticed the problem gone as soon as I went back to Firefox. I have often criticized Mozilla, because I care that Firefox remains the best browser, not just an alternative worth keeping.
Likes it
The main power advantage of the apple chips is when the system is mostly idle - under mid to high load power to watt has been comparable for a few years already (at least AMD and Apple, intel was way behind - but I guess they caught up recently). The main reason behind my M3 MBP back then wasn't so much power efficiency - but that I can get it with 96GB of RAM. It's nice that I can go a full office day without charging - the previous x86 notebook couldn't, but a decent one from the M3 generation probably could as well. But also if I put proper load an that thing the Macbook battery is done in less than 2 hours.
Neutral
> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices. When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
Doesn’t like it
On my personal computers I keep track of this and ensure nothing goes write-crazy. On my work laptop though (M3 Pro, 1TB), I’m at ~70% health. Iirc the lifetime writes are at >700TB. I do develop on it, but a lot of it is due to the various endpoint security software that’s always there logging every single possible thing but I can’t do much about it. I expect the ssd to die first in this laptop at this rate, so best I can do is ensure everything always synced/backed up from my local work laptop.
Likes it
Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.
Likes it
This app is cool and it showcases some use cases, but it still undersells what the E2B model can do. I just made a real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B. I posted it on /r/LocalLLaMA a few hours ago and it's gaining some traction right now [0]. Here's the repo [1] I'm running it on a Macbook instead of an iPhone, but based on the benchmark here [2], you should be able to run the same thing on an iPhone 17 Pro. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sda3r6/realtim... [1] https://github.com/fikrikarim/parlor [2] https://huggingface.co/litert-community/gemma-4-E2B-it-liter...
Doesn’t like it
I've been using Linux on the desktop for decades at this point. KDE Plasma is my current favorite and I've been using it for a few years now. It has everything you'd want in a desktop (maybe a bit more), looks great, and is very fast even on modest hardware. My current job has me using MacOS on an M3 Pro Macbook and I find it barely tolerable compared to KDE. Usually when I want to do something new or change some configuration, either there is no way to do it, or it's hidden behind some key combination that I never would have guessed. I would describe the overall feel of MacOS as "syrupy." When using the mouse or typing, there is almost always some kind of barely-perceptible latency. Nothing is ever crisp and instant. (This isn't specific to this machine, it feels the same way on every Mac I've borrowed.) It's sort of like someone decided that the only way to make it smooth was to also make it slow.
Likes it
What keeps me in the Appleverse is the hardware, and the software that Just Works with the hardware (I find that "Just Works" has been rapidly eroding in general, but naturally it still handles the hardware well). The alternatives are Linux on much worse hardware, or the non-starter that is Windows on anything whatsoever. I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
Likes it
Yes, Touch ID is faster to unlock in a desktop context. Watch auth works fast enough to unlock a Macbook by the time I open it in order to place a finger on Touch ID. Ymmv, this is me on reasonably updated and stock Air M1 and Pro M3 units.
Neutral
Fully agree. I used to have a company issued MBP M3 Pro, and when I switched roles I got myself base M4 Air. Can't complain at all in the past year, I do feel throttling at times when running longer tasks, but for 99% of the time I don't feel I need anything better. And I do work as a software developer, so anyone doing lighter usage not in this camp will feel the same. M5 Air should be pretty much the same.
Likes it
I am running Sway on a Gentoo on a 4 years old X1 carbon. > you will get similar usable battery life of around 6-8 hours My macbook M3 gives me way more than 6-8 hours, it's simply insane. It literallly lasts for multiple days. > Generally though, battery life isn't an issue anymore considering fast charging is everywhere. Not an issue indeed, I got used to always charging my X1 carbon. But then I got an M3 for work, and... well it feels like I don't have to charge it ever :-). As I said: very much a Linux person, but the M3 battery life is absolutely insane.
Likes it
I feel like folk in this thread haven't used a Macbook Pro from the past ten years or so — which is fine , I don't expect everyone to want to use MacOS (I prefer Linux) but the hardware is genuinely nice. On my personal 2019 MBP I have four USB C ports, and can charge via any of them. My work M3 MBP only has three, but has a full-size HDMI port too (and a magnetic charging port I've never used). I carry a cheap USB C dongle that works with pretty much anything and gives me a couple of USB A ports, HDMI, a USB C with pass-through charging, and Ethernet. It's great, and it's DP alt mode rather than TB so it works with anything (including Android phones with the right hardware). Apple definitely aren't perfect (although I do actually like my touch bar) but when they make hardware that works, it really does work well. I wish it were possible for other companies to make things as nicely.
Doesn’t like it
It looks really nice, but CPU usage is almost 100% all the time. I have a MacBook Pro M3. When I open some fancy Three.js scenes that I found on the net, I instantly profile them. Most of them are really bad in terms of performance. I don't know why.
Doesn’t like it
I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable. Maybe you'd notice it in lab setting but not irl. Kind of like 120hz and 4k; just useless to most peoples eyes at the distances people actually use these devices. I've only owned matte external monitors as well and again, no issues there. The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.