Enlarge / Apple is introducing three M3 performance tiers at the same time. (credit: Apple)

NEW YORK—None of the new Macs that Apple is announcing at its "Scary Fast" product event today look very different from the ones they're replacing on the outside, but the inside is another story. This is the first batch of Macs to include Apple's next-generation M3-series chips, and unlike past years, Apple is introducing multiple M3 performance tiers all at the same time.

The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max all share the same underlying CPU and GPU architectures, the same ones used in the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip. Also like the A17 Pro, all M3 chips are manufactured using a new 3 nm process from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Let's dive into everything we know about the M3 family's capabilities, plus the differences between each performance tier.

Meet the Apple M3 family

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  Apple prioritized comparisons to the M1 generation, which is more likely to be relevant for upgraders. But in context with the M2 numbers, M3 looks like a typical year-over-year upgrade. [credit: Apple ]

Apple says that the performance cores in any given M3 processor can run up to 30 percent faster than the M1's performance cores, and that the efficiency cores are up to 50 percent faster. Most of Apple's direct performance comparisons were to the M1 generation, which is useful insofar as M2 Mac owners aren't likely to want to spring for M3, but it has the added marketing benefit of making the performance increases sound larger than they are.

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  Apple leans into its event's spooky vibes with the new space black version of the MacBook Pro. [credit: Apple ]

NEW YORK—As expected , Apple has launched a newly refreshed lineup of 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros at its "Scary Fast" product event this evening, replacing not just the last-generation versions of those laptops but also the old 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The company is accomplishing that last goal by introducing a less-expensive $1,599 version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro that uses a regular M3 chip instead of the M3 Pro or M3 Max.

It isn't as fast, it starts with a skimpy 8GB of RAM of storage, it has one fewer Thunderbolt port (for a total of two), and it only supports a single external display. But at $1,599 , the M3 MacBook Pro is $400 cheaper than the M2 Pro/M3 Pro version of the laptop, and it still uses the larger high-refresh-rate ProMotion display, the contrast-boosting and bloom-reducing mini LED screen technology, the MagSafe connector, the 1080p camera, 512GB of storage in the base model, the speaker system, and a full-sized HDMI port. And while Apple quotes the same "up to 22 hours of battery life" for all of the new MacBook Pro models, in the real world, the M3 should give you a bit more runtime than the M3 Pro or Max.

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  The new iMac comes in the same seven colors as the old one. [credit: Apple ]

NEW YORK—The new MacBook Pros are the biggest news from Apple's October Mac event, but one other model got a long-overdue refresh, too—the 24-inch iMac, most recently refreshed with an Apple M1 processor in June 2021 .

The new iMac is available for order today, and the first ones will arrive on November 7. The base model, which includes an M3 with an 8-core GPU, 256GB of storage, two Thunderbolt ports, a non-Touch ID keyboard, and 8GB of RAM, starts at $1,299. An upgraded version with a 10-core GPU, a power brick-mounted gigabit Ethernet port, two additional USB-C ports, and a Touch ID keyboard starts at $1,499. Those prices are $1,249 and $1,399, respectively, for education users.

The most important upgrade—and really the only one of note—is an upgrade to the new M3 chip. Because it was the only Mac to totally skip the M2, the new iMac hops forward two generations at once. Apple says that the M3's four high-performance CPU cores are up to 30 percent faster than those in the M1, and that its four high-efficiency CPU cores are as much as 50 percent faster. Apple says that the 10-core GPU in the M3 is up to 2.5 times faster than the M1, and that its 16-core Neural Engine is up to 60 percent faster.

Enlarge / Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite could be the first Arm chip that can do for PCs what Apple Silicon did for Macs. (credit: Qualcomm)

For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips' performance have failed to dislodge Intel's or AMD's chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 .

But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company's founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel's Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs—and, less directly, Apple's M2 and M3-series processors for Macs.

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite will begin arriving in PCs starting in mid-2024. The company has also announced a new Snapdragon SoC for smartphones, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 .

Enlarge / A teaser image for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's annual " Snapdragon Summit " is coming up later this month, and the company appears ready to share more about its long-planned next-generation Arm processor for PCs. The company hasn't shared many specifics yet, but yesterday we finally got a name: " Snapdragon X, " which is coming in 2024, and it may finally do for Arm-powered Windows PCs what Apple Silicon chips did for Macs a few years ago (though it's coming a bit later than Qualcomm had initially hoped ).

Qualcomm has been making chips for PCs for years, most recently the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (you might also know it as the Microsoft SQ3, which is what the chip is called in Surface devices). But those chips have never quite been fast enough to challenge Intel's Core or AMD's Ryzen CPUs in mainstream laptops. Any performance deficit is especially noticeable because many people will run at least a few apps designed for the x86 version of Windows, code which needs to be translated on the fly for Arm processors.

So why will Snapdragon X be any different? It's because these will be the first chips borne of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia in 2021 . Nuvia was founded and staffed by quite a few key personnel from Apple's chipmaking operation, the team that had already upended a small corner of the x86 PC market by designing the Apple M1 and its offshoots. Apple had sued Nuvia co-founder and current Qualcomm engineering SVP Gerard Williams for poaching Apple employees, though the company dropped the suit without comment earlier this year.

Enlarge / Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For most of the last year, the rumor mill has indicated that the first wave of Apple’s M3 Macs will be hitting sometime this fall —perhaps in October, a month Apple has often used for iPad and Mac announcements that can’t be crammed into its iPhone and Apple Watch-focused product events in September.

But according to reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company won't launch those models before the end of the year . Kuo didn't share specifics, but he has sources inside Apple's manufacturing supply chains that often give him reliable information about the company's plans.

Apple's timing shifted similarly last year when M2-based MacBook Pro and Mac mini designs that were apparently intended for late 2022 launched in January 2023 instead.

Enlarge / The Apple Watch (seen here in its current iterations) is set to get a new look. (credit: Corey Gaskin )

Annual updates to the standard Apple Watch have been almost too small to mention for the past few years, and it looks like that trend will continue with the new wearables Apple plans to debut next month. But, according to a Bloomberg newsletter , a major Apple Watch overhaul is coming as soon as next year.

Dubbed "Watch X," it will be the 10th edition of the Apple Watch that was originally announced in 2014 and released in 2015. To commemorate the occasion, Apple is planning the most significant redesign of the Watch yet apart from the recently launched Ultra, which is more of a spinoff than a direct follow-up.

Of course, that's not saying much. Each year's update has typically brought one small change—like a slightly bigger screen, a modest CPU speed bump, or a new health tracking feature aimed at one specific ailment—such that there's little reason to upgrade even once every two or three years, much less annually.

Enlarge / The Mac Studio, a likely recipient of a new M3 Max chip. (credit: Andrew Cunninghan)

Apple's M3 processor generation is continuing to take shape thanks to what seem to be unreleased internal test devices that are showing up in the analytics data of third-party app developers. Back in May , Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on the specs of what appeared to be a new M3 Pro processor. Yesterday, Gurman revealed the specs of a new M3 Max , which has a total of 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, plus 48GB of memory (likely not the maximum that will be available since the current MacBook Pros can go up to 96GB).

The current M2 Max, found in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio, tops out at 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores. Gurman says that all four of the M3 Max's extra CPU cores should be large, high-performance cores rather than smaller efficiency cores; both kinds of cores boost speeds, but performance cores are obviously more useful for high-end workloads.

Earlier this week, Gurman also noticed a new base-model M3 chip that continued to use 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, just like the current M2. This chip would still be a speed upgrade from the M2, but it would have to rely on architectural improvements and clock speed boosts rather than extra cores. The original M1 used eight CPU cores as well, also split evenly between high-performance and high-efficiency cores.

Enlarge (credit: Asahi Linux/Fedora)

Asahi Linux, the project aiming to bring a fully functional Linux system to Apple computers running on that company's own M-series chips, has announced that its new "flagship distro" is Fedora Asahi Remix.

As announced at Fedora's Flock conference this week in Cork, Ireland, (and on Asahi Linux's blog ), the Fedora Asahi Remix should be officially released by the end of August 2023. You can try it out now , but you should "expect rough spots (or even complete breakage)."

The new distro will be "upstream-first," sending as many of its bespoke M-series tools back to Fedora's mainline offerings as possible. Hector Martin, writing on Asahi Linux's blog, notes that the existing project based on Arch Linux was "fully downstream." Asahi added its own package repository with scripts, forked kernel and Mesa packages, bootloader parts, and userspace support, but with "no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux." Neal Gompa from Fedora reached out to talk about integrating Asahi with Fedora after the project's debut, and work began in late 2021. Now it's ready to spread a bit further.