When Apple released the M3 MacBook Pro at its “Scary Fast” event last week, I ordered one—specifically a 14-inch M3 Pro with 36GB of RAM to replace my entry-level 14-inch M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM. Apple gave me more than $900 via a trade-in—more than half of what I paid for it—so it was something of a no-brainer to upgrade.
My focus with the upgrade was memory. When I bought the M1 Pro model in early 2022, I thought 16GB of memory would suffice. It hasn’t. When I have more than a handful of tabs open with Photoshop and Zoom, things tend to slow down a bit. So even though the base model technically comes with more RAM than the M1 (18GB vs 16GB), I opted to max out the memory for an extra $400, bringing the total to $2,599.
But over the weekend, I saw the first Geekbench 6 results for the 12-core M3 Pro processor and it confirmed my fears. While the M3 Pro CPU has more cores then my M1 Pro (12 vs 8), my two-year-old model has the same number of performance cores (six) as the new model. That’s actually two less than the 12-core M2 Pro, which had eight performance cores.
Read more at Macworld.com