The MacBook Pro is Back in Black, Now Powered with M3

It’s Halloween eve, and Apple brought along a few new desktop products to bask in the dark joys of spooky season, most notably a new Space Black color for the company’s leading laptops. Gizmodo had the opportunity to trick or treat through the new M3-powered laptops and desktop PCs as the company is trying to tout their new silicon’s monstrous power in a small size.

With all the Hallows Eve theming to Apple’s latest product announcement, the company’s “Scary Fast” digital event was filled with enough dark fog, and werewolf howls, supporting a new dark Halloween costume for its MacBook Pros. The MacBook Pros maintain their 14- and 16-inch sizes, while the iMac—the last of which was released back in 2021—remains at 24 inches. There’s no 32-inch iMac this year, unfortunately.

The biggest change for the MacBook Pros is found under the hood with the upgrade from the M2 chip to the M3. Most notably, the newfangled M3 silicon supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. It’s such an important feature that Apple wanted to show off the M3’s power with a few recent games as well as in 3D rendering.

The company chose a bare few video games to show off the capabilities of its new hardware. There was at least one major hit in the form of Baldur’s Gate III, but the company also tried to share the laptop’s capabilities with Myst and Lies of P, two games not exactly known as graphic powerhouses. Each game was running on medium to low settings except for Stray, running on high with the base M3 on iMac.

With the Max models allowing for up to 128 GB of RAM, the M3 Max could run graphics rendering software with enough wiggle room to have still around 40 GB of memory left over for other activities. We’re told the beefiest M3 chips can support up to four high quality displays at once, though we only had the chance to see it run on two.