AppleInsider · Kasper's Automated Slave

Following Arm's recent initial public offering, it has reportedly been unsuccessfully pressing Apple to pay more than $0.30 per iPhone for its intellectual property.

Apple and Arm have a history that goes back decades to the Newton era. Back in the late 1980s, Apple even owned 43% of the company, but it steadily sold off its shares through the next decade.

Most recently, Arm issued its first IPO, and according to Reuters, Apple has invested somewhere between $25 million and $100 million.

Consequently, a new report from The Information that initially describes Arm as a straightforward supplier to Apple is unclear. Nonetheless, the report concentrates on the intellectual property licensing fees that Apple pays Arm.

According to Wednesday's report, Masayoshi Son, CEO of Arm's parent company SoftBank, gathered management to lecture them about how little money Apple pays.

Reportedly, Son told Arm management that Apple pays more for what The Information describes as "the piece of plastic that protects the screens of new iPhones" than it does to Arm.

Six years later, and after a blockbuster intellectual property licensing deal that will run for decades, Apple is reportedly paying Arm under 30 cents per device. This is said to be the lowest rate that any firm has with Arm, and specifically around half of what Qualcomm and Mediatek pays.

Apple is said to account for under 5% of Arm's total sales, and in the financial year ending March 31, 2023, Arm reported $524 million net income.

Apparently, Son is still waving an iPhone around in meetings, according to unspecified sources, unhappy at how Arm can be earning so comparatively little when its processors are in so many devices.

At some point since 2016, Softbank's Son phoned Tim Cook to say that Arm would be raising its prices. Reportedly, Cook's staff just referred Son to the contract Apple had with Arm.

With that door shut, Son tried getting Arm to raise prices with every other company it works with, and those firms pushed back enough that the plan was scrapped.

That contract between Apple and Arm was due to expire in 2028. The two companies have since signed "a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040," said Arm in September 2023, "continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple's access to the Arm architecture."

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As the universe counts down the clock to Apple's upcoming "reinvention" of augmented reality computing with its new Vision Pro early in the new year, it's useful to take a look at how successful it has been at reinventing the computing platform in the past. It's happened more often than you might think.

Apple has, quite miraculously, delivered the technology world an extraordinary list of world-changing innovations. It has invented and perfected entirely new products and platforms that shifted what and how consumers buy, monumentally changing how the world works, and drastically altering the commercial and industrial lay of the land.

Please indulge me a moment to articulate how this all happened before, as a way to confidently predict whether it can ever happen again.

To prep yourself for Vision Pro, stop to appreciate the first Mac

The original Mac in 1984 not only changed-- across the entire industry-- how we worked with computers, but also changed how software was written. On that new Mac desktop, there was an under-appreciated innovation by Apple that decreed that all apps "must" share the same conceptual conventions, from copy and pasting to printing to saving documents.

You have to be quite advanced in age to even call into mind what a mess desktop computing was before the Mac, particularly in regard to third party computer applications -- or "computer programs," before Apple's Human User Interface Guideline writers coined the term that we today shorten to "app." The first Macintosh didn't just bring to market a new desktop appearance with a mouse and pointer; it also performed all the invisible heavy lifting to sort out how the desktop and its apps should function.

This was a sea change. Before the Mac, every function of every program on every computer needed to be learned independently-- they didn't work the same way. This benefited old app developers that made programs like Lotus and WordPerfect at the expense of everyone else, because it allowed them to create their own platforms of operation that served as difficult barriers of entry to competition.

Even Microsoft was prevented from a successful commercial launch its own new Office apps across PCs until it first copied Apple's well thought out aspect of the consistent Mac desktop design and finally delivered this to PC users just over a decade later with Windows 95. And most of that time involved litigating its way into finding a way to appropriate Apple's work without consequence.

Microsoft took the value Apple had created and reused it to power sales of Office, eventually erasing any need for anyone to pay Apple for Mac hardware just to get the Mac-like value of its design consistency.

The original Mac certainly was for a time a moneymaker for Apple, but it ended up that Windows 95 had far more impact on the world, from users to the apps industry, because Microsoft didn't just copy Apple once. Microsoft kept adapting its Windows product line to find and attract more customers and more platform partners.

Apple lost out on the computing reinvention it had ignited because it got sidetracked in delivering things people weren't going to be paying for (like OS support for crafting fancy ligatures) while failing to control the underlying technologies powering its product and delivering the value that people would actually pay for.

By 1996, Apple was already in free fall. That's a quite rapid implosion following the broad commercial introduction of Windows 95 as a "cheaper Mac" just a couple years earlier.

That fall was so rapid and so dramatic that it impressed itself in the minds of PC journalists and thinkers for decades the way that the Great Depression and WWII and Vietnam and COVID-19 all seared the life experience of the generations of people who lived through them and forever scarred how they think, act, and understand the world.

Almost another decade later, Apple was still viewed by almost everyone in tech media as the "beleaguered company that had failed," which could never again catch up and certainly even if it did would have its crown taken away, probably again by Microsoft. All of the valuable lessons of the first Macintosh were largely erased and replaced with a pure fallacy that anything that seemed to be cheaper and perhaps more "open," in the way that the Windows PC was, would "always win."

Apple reinvented mobile computing

If you were alive and voraciously reading about consumer technology in 2006 (perhaps a larger part of my core audience, although still a slim subset of today's population) you can certainly recall the second "reinvention of computing" that Apple is broadly credited with. At that time, the new Phone hadn't shipped yet, but the tech world was abuzz with rumors and analysis that suggested something big was around the corner, much the same as in today's prelude to Vision Pro.

Today, we are currently living in the giddy period of time comparable to early 2007, after Steve Jobs had showed off new iPhone at the January Macworld Expo, but before it actually went on sale that summer.

We had seen marketing photos of it, we got to see the general outline of how it works, we had some understanding of the internals. But, we were also getting fed non-stop criticism and some full-on disbelief by parties representing the rival companies that would ultimately be crushed by its arrival.

Back then, it was difficult to be taken seriously in thinking that there was any chance that Apple would "walk right in" and suck all the oxygen away from the world leaders in mobile devices. That included the once giants Nokia, Motorola, RIM Blackberry, Ericsson, Sony, Palm and so many more that had been the Lotus and WordPerfect of their era.

In large part, that perception was held was because Apple had fallen ten years prior when Microsoft and all the hardware companies that were failing to make their own Mac competitors joined together for Windows 95 and ultimately snatched away Apple's desktop crown. Surely history would work out exactly the same this time, right? Yet as anyone who follows fashion or history knows, trends don't repeat, they rhyme.

When you're old enough to see cycles happen, you can adapt to them, just as Apple did.

Apple had already reinvented mobile computing

All those years ago, Apple's first iPhone in 2007 was greeted with some significant skepticism not only because tech writers had fresh in mind the previous vanquishing of Apple's Mac by Microsoft, but also because they had grown used to repeating the public relations narratives of another group of industry competitors: the iPod killers who never actually killed the iPod.

Apple's 2001-2006 iPod era had been a monumental, preliminary part of its sneaky introduction of iPhone that allowed the company to eventually (and then quite rapidly) obliterate every existing facet of the then-existing telecom industry and replace everything with its own design.

Some smartphone executives, like Palm's CEO, famously mused that Apple wouldn't "walk right in." Others, like Microsoft's Steve Ballmer nervously laughed at how "expensive" iPhone was compared with what they'd been commercially struggling to offer to consumers during the pre-iPhone era.

Both also knew in the back of their minds something else had already occurred. Apple had just spent years "walking" into the consumer music industry with its unusually "expensive" iPod, and yet customers globally could barely contain themselves from buying millions of new ones every year.

Buyers were primed to demand an iPhone even before it went on sale because they'd already seen what a convenient, valuable mobile music (dare I say PDA?) device that iPod had been, consistently year after year following its incremental arrival as a luxuriously extravagant way to have "1000 songs in your pocket," something a CD Walkman couldn't do, and something that the digital music industry's heavyweights Sony and Microsoft couldn't similarly pull off despite their own unfettered access to the same core technologies Apple was using.

Apple didn't have some unique access to digital music storage, FireWire connectivity, music library software, or mobile device hardware construction that Sony and Microsoft and the other iPod killers lacked. Apple was the underdog.

Yet, Apple came out on top and turned the "MP3 player" industry upside down the same way that it had introduced the Mac, and the same way it would subsequently introduce iPhone.

For all three products, Apple first worked internally for a significant time determining how it could ship a functional device with some serious limitations, then dramatically introduced a real product while clearly communicating its value, as it worked with platform partners to help it bridge the things it couldn't do alone. It had also learned-- certainly with the return of Steve Jobs-- that every interaction also needed to be followed up with relentless advancement to keep it ahead of another Microsoft-ing.

A main reason why iPhone-era critics were so flabbergasted by the success of Apple's new phone is that they'd preached for so long that Apple was soon going to lose its iPod business that they believed it themselves as a core of their understanding of reality. But of course, competitors can't walk in and steal away your core competency when you simply transition it into another product that's even better and ever harder to copy.

Figure out what's next!

"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good," Jobs once observed, "then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."

At first glance, that might not seem the most eloquently pithy thing a tech visionary has said.

Yet, Apple printed out those words and emblazoned them in its original campus in a prominent location outside its first theater, in a place not only easily seen by its employees, but also by investors and the tech media it would invite to see whatever it was figuring out to be next.

When Jobs returned to Apple, his first priority was to figure out what was next for the Mac, in the perilous years after Microsoft had ripped off all of its apparent value and passed that off as its own work. The pillaging of the Mac as a product and platform by Windows 95 had been devastating for Apple as a company, economically, intellectually, and reputationally.

Yet by returning to and refining the core principles of how to be an innovator, Apple not only reinvented the Mac using NeXT's software to establish a new platform that could generate revenue and get Apple back on the right track, but subsequently could branch out into music with iTunes and iPod, then into mobile phones with iPhone. Those were not simply "two new products." They were product lines that relentlessly advanced every year.

Just three years later, Apple took the technology and techniques that got it that far to introduce iPad, revolutionizing the "tablet market," as well as erasing the supposed markets imagined for netbooks, super cheap laptop PCs, Chromebooks, convertibles and folding screen phones, and so many more half-baked product concepts that flopped out into the market without being ready, without communicating clear value, without forging effective partnerships, and without being relentlessly advanced after their version 1.0.

The outside tech world has failed to grasp why Apple became so successful. Since 2010's iPad, the Microsofts and Androids of the world have desperately tried to launch volleys of fancy new smartphones and tablets with little success. Yet even as they have repeatedly failed to snatch away Apple's crown following the model of Windows 95 (and folks, that one-time intellectual shakedown occured nearly 30 years ago), Apple has moved into building new branches.

The conspiracy to tell everyone that Apple isn't figuring out what's next

Since 2001, Apple not only vanquished every major MP3, mobile phone, and tablet maker with the arrival of iPod, iPhone and iPad across the first years of the Millennium, but has subsequently moved into wearables with Apple Watch, hearables with AirPods, whereables with AirTags, and televisisables with the new iOS-based Apple TV across the last several years.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which terms I coined.

At the risk of sounding fan-boyish (for which I am not at all embarrassed or concerned about being labeled as, because the shoe fits) I have to proclaim that Apple has pulverized any threat of competitive usurpers from wrenching away its markets for music, phones, tablets, watches, earbuds, home devices and TV entertainment and running with an embezzled copy of its platforms and products. Not even Samsung's most eye-rolling copies have enjoyed long-lasting success.

This makes it really bizarre to try to understand why every contrarian blogger-analyst pundit in the technology world thinks that Apple "isn't innovating" but somehow the industry's commercial losers are because they have something quirky and different and perhaps it's cheap or folds somehow or can load up software in a way that makes it unsafe at any speed. Sometimes things are controversial but sometimes it's just ignorant conspiracy floated by people who want things to be different, either because they want to get paid to deliver some ideology or because they're so blinded by it they're volunteering for free.

We live in the best possible tech universe alternative

That being said, today's Apple is also not erecting the kind of ugly monopolistic empire of half-assery that Microsoft established in the miserable tech decade after it stole the valuable concepts of the Mac way back before most people today were even born or were at least aware of what a computer is. The U.S. median age is under 40 if you need to feel older today, but let's not dwell on that.

Today, if you want a smartphone, tablet, sliding or folding PC, headphones, watch, or TV dongle made by a company that isn't Apple, you have an exceptional range of suitable products that will delight you and which can be used without concern that Apple will somehow deprive you of access to media, apps, or services the way that Microsoft deliberately leveraged its Windows monopoly to force professionals to buy a PC and pay for Windows licensing taxes even if they just wanted to run a Linux command line.

Sure there are debatable criticisms about whether Apple should be compelled to write and maintain its own software for your oddball platform choice, or whether it should allow you the Owner to swap out a broken OEM component for some counterfeit part you sourced from the People's Republic of China at a discount, or whether Apple should be forced to build and maintain non-vetted App Store access to competitors who don't want to have to support the safe and reliable platforms they use and their customers have chosen, or whether Apple should have to implement some tight integration between its messaging platform and the competitor who claimed for decades to be "better at software" and have "more customers choosing its alternative" with a flurry of failed messaging platform flops that it couldn't deliver on its own.

But despite these ostensibly controversial beefs, the reality -- or perhaps "spectrum of indisputable facts" -- details that we are living in the best possible alternative universe of technology, where there's a great company that delivers the best stuff that's all quite expensive but worth it. And yet, there is also vibrant and significant competition allowing for fans of another variety to own a Pixel paired with a round watch and busy-box folding screen PC with a stylus marker and USB-A ports if they really want to swing that way.

And if your text bubbles are green as a consequence, deal with it. It's nothing like being forced to use Microsoft DRM or a Windows web browser, or dreadful smartphones with buttons, or be forced to use Cingular, or be tracked with surveillance advertising, or slowed to a crawl by "Defender" malware scanning.

Will the best possible alternative reality deliver the best possible immersive reality?

Now perhaps you've already made the connection, but the crux of the rhetorical question I wanted to answer here unequivocally is: what if the reinvention of computing that we anticipate to be just around the corner with Vision Pro has already been delivered, at least in principle?

What if Apple already demonstrated that it can reinvent computing and we just haven't fully appreciated it yet, because we're like frogs in the incrementally hot water waiting for things to get dangerous?

Just as incessant waves of new iPods set up the world for the revolution of iPhone-- from its core technologies to its operational handling of massive-scale component purchases orchestrated by a younger, almost unknown at the time Tim Cook, to its internal software helmed by Scott Forstall, and music platform run by Eddy Cue, its industrial design championed by Jony Ive, and its retail store development launched by Ron Johnson -- tomorrow's Vision Pro sits on the same technological foundations that have incrementally revolutionized Apple's current Macs.

The Mac just hasn't got so much credit for re-revolutionizing the PC world and setting up Apple to obliterate computing done immersively rather than on a display screen. Yet much the same way that iPod prepared the universe for iPhone, today's Mac has shifted from being just a customized Intel PC running its own software not so long ago, to being a completely custom device with more in common with today's iOS than the original Macintosh or a Windows 95 sort of thing.

Key to this has been software transitions recently floated which uniquely bring the vastly larger platform of iOS and iPad apps to the Mac, facilitating internal cross platform developments such as Home, News, Maps, Music, TV, Podcasts and so on, on the Mac. Additionally, Apple Silicon incrementally brought tight firmware integration into MacBooks with chips that first handled more types of media encoding and authentication and security tasks, then launched to full Intel-free Application Processor SoCs (those delicious M chips) that radically changed Macs into instantly booting, snappily launching, battery sipping, super advanced machines that have left PC makers as flatfooted as yesterday's smartphone makers in 2007 or tablet manufacturers in 2010.

M1 MacBook

And just a back then, Apple's competitors and their PR staffs with their tightly integrated tech journalists keep telling us that really soon now, perhaps right around the corner, their own PCs will also have advanced "ARM chips" with integrated GPUs and AI engines that don't require huge fans and air ducts and howling vents. Someday real soon Windows will deliver Voice First or some kind of AI that will do everything for you.

Maybe it will even recognize when you've been infected with malware -- or maybe it will skip the middleman and take advantage of you with tracking and surveillance advertising in order to make itself more affordable.

Technology doesn't come first!

Tech bloggers: stop begging for titillating innovation over titivating incremental improvement! And stop asking for Apple to shoehorn the latest tech fads into its products. Jobs himself detailed why functionality came before technology.

"One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," Jobs told developers as he returned to Apple. "You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it. And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?' Not starting with Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how we're going to market that.'"

As someone who had to become an expert in decrypting the false promises of the technology industry, I can bypass having to explain why all of this is meritless, simply by pointing out how rapidly Apple has been incrementally enhancing all of its platforms, and how its now poised to deliver the first step in immersive computing while delivering the world's advanced computing platform that already works today.

I've been scoffed at for years for pointing out that Apple hasn't really had any real threat from competition for many years, and in hindsight it's hard to argue that it has. Yet there's enough efforts at competition-- billions thrown away from Google, Microsoft, Samsung and China's state makers-- all trying to be Apple, that it effectively keeps the company from getting too comfortably numb to the real risk of complacently.

The biggest actual risk to Apple today is that the world might collapse into total chaos and a new era of medieval war, superstition and environmental catastrophe. But short of that, we're in the best timeline we can be in for the launch of Vision Pro. And the best thing for Apple: it's so safe and functional right now that it doesn't need a lucky Hail Mary pass to save it from apparent economic disaster the way it did in 1996 or 2001 or 2006.

Vision Pro can incrementally slip out like a delicately birthed helpless child and take years to develop into an AR warrior. We can all leisurely bathe like frogs in its warming waters until it lights up and takes over the world and cooks off any existential competition to delivering a computing world that puts us in the center.

Because Apple is already really adept and doing that. When you boot up your M-series Mac you're already nearly there.

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The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max, especially outfitted like our review unit, is expensive, but it delivers power and computing heft roughly equivalent to the M2 Ultra Mac Studio for that cash.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review in Space Black

Upon retrospect, the thought that Apple would wait longer for M3 was a mistake. The company short-cycled not its M3 release, but its M3 Pro and M3 Max pattern and dropped all three chips at the same time.

In other generations, we would've seen the upgrade to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro months after Apple brought out its latest chip generation. For M3, Apple has destroyed convention by launching three chips, including the M3 Pro and M3 Max, and made the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro among the first releases of this generation.

The decision to launch brings with it a problem for the "time is money" crowd. If they bought a top-spec M2 Max version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro in January, they would wonder if there's any point in making an upgrade after less than half a year of ownership.

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We'll be talking about M3 Pro in a different piece, there is a lot to say about that unit. But, if time is money, the M3 Max is an incredibly solid upgrade over the M2 Max chip that first saw the light of day 10 months ago.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Design

The 16-inch MacBook Pro hasn't seen any real external changes at all. At least, if you're looking at the standard color option.

It's still inside a well-machines and finished slab of mostly-recycled aluminum that's just 0.66 inches thick when folded. It's also the same width at 14.01 inches and 9.77 inches deep, so it has the same footprint as its immediate predecessor.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: New MagSafe 3 cable and Thunderbolt ports

The weight's unchanged too, at 4.7 pounds if you go for the M3 Pro, or 4.8 pounds if you go full-bore with the M3 Max.

The last one was unmistakably a MacBook Pro in nature, thanks to Apple's well-established aesthetics. The M3 version is exactly the same, with its thin bezels, solid feel, and great finish.

Except there is one highlight change to the appearance: You can get a black one. Sort of.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: Silver, Midnight, Space Gray, and Space Black colors

For the end of 2023, the Space Gray has been switched out for Space Black, which is still offered alongside the standard Silver.

It's just not that black owing more to material science and the difficulty of coloring aluminum with saturated colors than anything else. We've posted examples on social media about it, but it's more a darker gray than anything else. For this generation, at least, matte, deep black Mac enjoyers need not apply.

Opened up, you have the standard 78-key backlit Magic Keyboard, complete with its 12 full-height function keys and ambient light sensor. Touch ID is in the top-right corner for your logging-in and authentication needs.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Display and Audio

The new display is nearly identical to the one in the M2 Max MacBook Pro. Once again, users get to experience the 16.2-inch display, backlit by mini-LED which helps with contrast, brightness, and vivid color. That Liquid Retina XDR display is a 3,456 by 2,234 resolution, which is the same as last time.

Also unchanged is the Wide Color (P3) coverage, Apple's True Tone color-changing technology, and ProMotion. That latter point enables adaptive refresh rates of up to 120Hz, which is normal for the feature.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: The notch is unchanged

The notch reappears at the top, housing the FaceTime HD camera. Even now, Apple is still avoiding using the notch for anything else, such as Face ID, so it will continue to annoy a small subset of the audience for another generation. For us, it makes no difference, but we acknowledge that opinions vary on this.

What has changed is an oddly small element, namely brightness. If you're looking at typical SDR content, the brightness of the display now goes up to 600 nits, up from the 500 nits of the M2 generation.

This does mean that it will be brighter for looking at everyday content and for typical usage, but that benefit isn't applied for other types of image. The XDR brightness allows for 1,000 nits of sustained full-screen brightness for HDR content viewing, 1,600 nits at peak, but this is still the same sort of brightness levels you would see from its predecessor.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Ports, power, and periphery

After you go beyond the high performance of the M3 Max chip and the change in color options, the rest of the specifications of the 16-inch MacBook Pro are exactly the same as the M2 variant.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: The right side has an SDXC card reader, Thunderbolt port, and an HDMI output

The ports selection still consist of three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports as well as a HDMI port and SDXC card slot. To the rear on one side, you also have MagSafe 3.

The Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI combined with the M3 Max do allow for some extensive external video options. You can have up to three 6K 60Hz screens on the Thunderbolt connections, as well as a 4K 144Hz screen on the HDMI.

Go down to three external displays, and that HDMI option can become an 8K 60Hz screen or a 4K 240Hz version.

Audio is again dealt with by a six-speaker sound system with force-cancelling woofers, offering wide stereo sound and support for Spatial Audio when playing Dolby Atmos content. A trio of "studio-quality" mics in an array with a high signal-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming handle audio input.

For audio purists, there's support for high-impedance headphones via the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The FaceTime HD camera in the notch is the same 1080p resolution as last time, ably assisted by the M3 Max's image signal processor and computational video features.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: Using an external SSD

On the wireless connectivity side, there's Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support yet again, though these will only reach their full potential if you're using devices or network infrastructure that support them.

Power is supplied via a 100-watt-hour lithium polymer battery, once again, which offers up to 22 hours of Apple TV app movie playback and up to 15 hours of wireless web access. This isn't any different from the M2 model, but it's safe to say there's loads of battery that will keep the machine running at maximum performance instead of throttling down like for Windows workstation laptops that will keep most Mac users happy.

There is a 140W USB-C power adapter included in the box. This works for both the included MagSafe connector, and with a USB-C cable to a Thunderbolt port.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Performance

At the top end of the performance scale is the M3 Max chip, which is part of the model being put under review. For this review, AppleInsider is using a top-spec configuration, consisting of the 16-core M3 Max with a 40-core GPU.

That top chip also splits its 16 CPU cores towards performance, with 12 performance cores joined by four efficiency cores.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: More games than ever arrive on Mac

It's also bundled with 128GB of unified memory, though you can also configure it with 48GB or 64GB. Even better, the 400GB/s of memory bandwidth should help eke out as much performance as possible from the chip.

If you didn't want top-end power, there's other configurations available. For a start, you could get the M3 Max with a 14-core CPU and 30-core GPU, though the memory options then change to either 36GB or 96GB.

This could be quite confusing if you have a particular amount of memory you want, but if you're thinking about the chip first before memory, it's not that hard to figure out.

There's also a 12-core M3 Pro option if to save some money, complete with an 18-core GPU, though you're stuck with 18GB or 38GB of memory alone.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: Editing in Final Cut Pro

As well as high-performing core counts and a bigger GPU, there are other elements, including the 16-core Neural Engine, which is now capable of 18 trillion operations per second.

On the GPU side, Apple's also included hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which will help games and graphical applications, such as 3D renderers like Blender. More useful will be Dynamic Caching, which optimizes memory to increase the average GPU utilization.

The Media Engine provides hardware-accelerate video encoding and decoding, has also been given a bit of a boost. The existing video decode engines, two video encode engines, and pairs of ProRes encode and decode engines has been joined by AV1 decoding support, on top of H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW.

Apple has made lots of claims about the performance of its M3 generation, including that it is up to 2.5x faster than a 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max.

In Apple's real-world examples of how fast this is, noise reduction in DaVinci Resolve Studio is 65% faster than the M1 Max model, while Maxon Redshift rendering is up to 2.5 times faster.

Geekbench Single-Core benchmarks

On a benchmark basis, the full-whack M3 Max gets 3,209 on Geekbench's single-core test, and 21,202 on the multi-core. Against the M2 Max at 2,729 and 14,403 respectively, that's a massive leap forward in performance.

Geekbench Multi-Core benchmarks

Considering that the M2 Ultra can score 2,766 and 21,101 respectively under the same tests, it certainly underlines what the M3 Max can offer users.

Geekbench Metal and OpenGL benchmarks

On Geekbench's OpenGL and Metal tests, the M3 Max makes an admirable effort with considerable improvements over the M2 Max. On Metal, the M3 gets 155,991 versus the M2's 135,839, while OpenGL results are 92,004 and 84,794 respectively.

Of course, the M3 Max's GPU can't meet the 219,609 Metal and 127,999 OpenGL scores set by the Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra. With 60 GPU cores to play with in our test, it has far more than the 30 or 40 cores you can configure an M3 Max chip with.

What we're looking at here, though is M2 Ultra Mac Studio or 2023 Mac Pro minus PCI-E CPU performance delivery, in a portable package.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - High-end professional workflow performance

Our main test-beds here are three-fold.

• 2023 MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Max, 128GB of RAM, and 8TB of storage
  
• Mac Pro 16-core 3.2 Ghz Intel Xeon W, with 1TB RAM, 4TB SSD, and an Afterburner card


• 2023 Mac Pro with M2 Ultra with 60-core GPU, 192GB of RAM, and 4TB of SSD space

As with our Mac Pro review, one of the tested workflows includes high-altitude image processing, and identification of subjects of interest on the ground, with data pulled from a 3TB database. In all of these tests, the database was loaded on the internal SSD.

The code is Apple Silicon-native, and leverages the Afterburner card and Apple's Video Toolkit.

In 2013, this test took about a full day to complete on the hardware of the day.

Image Enhancement and Identification testing

Another workflow that I'm more frequently using as of late is simulating fluid flow over a moving body, such as over a boat hull. This is a calculation-heavy job, and doesn't have a lot of GPU involvement. It is also Intel-native code, and run on the Mac Pro with Rosetta.

Complex Fluid Flow Over A Moving Body tests

The third workflow I'm also using more than I have been is a simulation of water and steam flowing through a complex engineered system. It includes heat transfer and fluid flow, and is also calculation-heavy. It is also Apple Silicon-native code.

Complex Fluid Flow Through Piping test results

The fourth workflow is stoichiometry. It remains a very complex chemical equilibrium reaction calculation and simulation involving the interaction of organic compounds with inorganic ones. It is also Apple Silicon native code.

Chemistry Stoichiometry Reaction Calculation and Simulation test results

As before, our final workflow is an Xcode compilation of the application used in the third benchmarking run.

Xcode Compile test results

The similarities in delivery speed were surprising. We'd expected to see a bit more of a gap given the differences in RAM between the Apple Silicon units. RAM pressure was the steepest on the third workflow, and we feel that that one could be faster with more RAM on Apple Silicon, but the job still got done.

We re-ran the tests on battery, in performance mode, and the results didn't change. Even outside of performance mode, the delivered speeds were only a few seconds slower in every case.

As always, thanks to my partners across several industries for letting me use their computers for testing and evaluation. And, we deeply appreciate their enthusiasm for this process spanning the 2023 Veterans Day weekend.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Pricing

As usual, a fully-spec'd out 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max comes at a hefty cost -- but remains well short of Mac Pro pricing. With the top chip, 128GB of memory, and the maximum 8TB of storage, the price is $7,199.

Of course, part of the problem is that Apple's upgrade charges are high. Apple doesn't use magic flash that nobody else uses, nor does it have particularly amazing RAM. They charge like they do, though.

The easiest way to cut costs is to reduce the SSD capacity, since going external is easy. A 1TB storage drive is the lowest it can go, and can save users $2,200 in the process.

The memory upgrade is also painful for the wallet, with the difference between 48GB and 128GB being a cool $1,000. This is the true Apple tax.

Going for the still-ample 48GB of unified memory and the usable 1TB SSD brings the cost down to $3,999. Most of the performance at almost half the top-spec price.

The Apple Silicon Mac Pro that we used for testing, albeit with more RAM than in the MacBook Pro, more Thunderbolt, and PCI-E, comes in at $10,799 (check prices). The M2 Ultra Mac Studio, also with more RAM, hits $8,799.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Raw portable power

Apple loves its creatives. It uses them in most of its advertising, while speaking about power, flexibility, and setting imagination free. But, it's a dirty secret that the main workflows on most MacBook Pros when looked at a holistic whole, are simple. It's mostly Word, Excel, some light entertainment, and so forth.

Nearly all of the MacBook Pro line shipped and sold aims at those office users, and it's still-widening enterprise customer base, with some light creative or engineering work thrown in. This high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro is very clearly not.

MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max review: Great portable power

Even so, Pro means nothing as it pertains to Apple's product line other than "not entry level" and it's not meant anything tangible beyond that for many years now. The 2023 crop of MacBook Pro hardware spans a range from "just a bit better than MacBook Air" to this unit, which is delivers more or less the same performance as the 2023 Mac Pro.

There are already a lot of nonsensical tests popping up on YouTube on the other side of the MacBook Pro product line than our test unit in this review. Notably, we've seen a few from who you'd expect to see them from, where applications are run with minimum recommended requirements significantly higher than the hardware that it's running on, run in conjunction with other "real-world" applications to try and prove a pre-ordained conclusion that was decided upon before the testing even started.

None of this proves anything more than if you bog down a computer with applications that it doesn't have the resources to run, it will unsurprisingly not run well. This is not shocking.

Nobody's going to buy a 8GB MacBook Pro for dynamic fluid flow calculations, or Blender rendering. Doing those tests and holding them up anything beyond entertainment remains nonsensical. The maxim "the right tool for the right job" -- and using that tool appropriately -- remains apt.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max is that right tool for that complex calculation while still doing other things on the computer. And it makes us look forward to the M3 Ultra Mac Studio.

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Pros

• Great and sturdy design


• M3 Max performance is about the same as the M2 Ultra

M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro review - Cons

• Borderline extortionate RAM and SSD upgrade pricing


• Still no way to upgrade after initial purchase

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Where to buy the M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro

Apple's M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro is heavily discounted exclusively for AppleInsider readers. Save $250 on every M3 Max model (or $200 on M2 Pro models) with promo code APINSIDER at Apple Authorized Reseller Adorama. You can find the best MacBook Pro deals, including offers from Amazon, B&H, and Best Buy, in our M3 16-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide.

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Apple has reportedly stalled development on iOS 18, macOS 15, iPadOS 18, and other major updates it will introduce in 2024 to work on fixing bugs.

The expected introduction of iOS and iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and Apple's other milestone releases in WWDC 2024 and their eventual release in roughly ten months time seems like a long way off. However, Apple has allegedly decided to pause all work on the future operating systems, in favor of a period of bug fixing.

According to Bloomberg, Apple informed employees of the delay at the start of November, people with knowledge of the announcement explained. Instead of working on new items, engineers are instead working to fix issues and improve the performance of what has already been produced.

After the discovery of what was deemed too many bugs by software lead Craig Federighi's team, it was decided that the engineers would go on a week-long improvement sprint. Following the end of the pause, engineers will return to working on new features.

While a delay in development can be a problem in may cases, a delay of a week with such long development times is a prudent way to try and minimize bugs that could end up in the final software.

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Of all the new products I've reviewed across 15 years of writing for AppleInsider, Apple Watch has certainly has made the most impact to me personally. A couple weeks ago it literally saved my life.

Apple's Crash Detection can and has saved lives

I'm not the first person to be saved by paramedics alerted by an emergency call initiated by Crash Detection. There have also been complaints of emergency workers inconvenienced by false alert calls related to events including roller coasters, where the user didn't cancel the emergency call in time.

But I literally have some skin in the game with this new feature because Crash Detection called in an emergency response for me as I was unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk, alone and late at night. According to calls it made, I was picked up and on my way to an emergency room within half an hour.

Because my accident occurred in a potentially dangerous and somewhat secluded area, I would likely have bled to death if the call hadn't been automatically placed.

Not just for car crashes

Apple created the feature to watch for evidence of a "severe car crash," using data from its devices' gyroscopes and accelerometers, along with other sensors and analysis that determines that a crash has occured and that a vehicle operator might be disabled or unable to call for help themselves.

More than five hours later I was shocked how much blood was on the back of my ER mattress--and later, how much I saw on the sidewalk!

In my case, there was no car involved. Instead, I had checked out a rental scooter intending to make a quick trip back to where I'd parked my car.

But after just a couple blocks, my trip was sidelined by a crash. I was knocked unconscious on the side of a bridge crossing over a freeway.

A deep gash above my eye was bleeding heavily. I began losing a lot of blood.

I didn't regain consciousness for another five hours, leaving me at the mercy of my technology and the health workers Crash Detection was able to contact on my behalf.

Crash Detection working as intended

Even though I wasn't driving a conventional vehicle, Crash Detection determined that I had been involved in a serious accident and that I wasn't responding. Within 20 seconds, it called emergency services with my location. Within thirty minutes I was loaded in an ambulance and on the way to the emergency room.

When I came to, I had to ask what was happening. That's the first I found out that I was getting my eyebrow stitched up and had various scrapes across the half of my face that I had apparently used to a break my fall. I couldn't remember anything.

Even later after reviewing the circumstances, I had no relocation of an accident occurring. When visiting the scene of the crash, I could only see the aftermath. Blood was everywhere, but there was not enough there to piece together what exactly had happened.

The experience was a scary reminder of how quickly things can happen and how helpless we are in certain circumstances. Having wearable technology watching over us and providing an extra layer of protection and emergency response is certainly one of the best features we can have in a dangerous world.

Almost always, I find myself in the position of making difficult decisions and figuring out how to get out of predicaments. But in the rare occasions where I've been knocked out which has only happened a few times in my entire life, there's a more difficult realization that I'd be completely powerless in the face of whatever problems might occur.

With the amount of blood that I was losing, I couldn't have laid there very long before I would have died. Loss of consciousness and blood is a bad combination for threatening brain damage, too.

I am grateful that I'm living in the current future where we have trusted mobile devices that volunteer to jump in to save us if we are knocked out.

Who would opt-in to Crash Detection

Last year, Apple's introduction of Crash Detection on iPhone 14 models, Apple Watch Series 8, and Apple Watch Ultra, was derided by some who worried that the volume of false alerts would be a bigger problem than the few extra lives that might be saved by such a tool.

There were false alerts noted at ski lifts, roller coasters, and by other emergency responders who noted an uptick in calls detailing an incident where the person involved didn't respond to explain it wasn't actually an emergency.

Several observers insisted at the time that the Crash Detection system should be "opt-in," similar to the Fall Detection feature Apple had introduced on Apple Watch to report less dramatic accidents suffered by people over 55.

However, it's impossible to have the system only ever working when it is essential. In my situation, I wouldn't have thought to turn on a system to watch me ride a scooter a few blocks. I probably would have assumed that a scooter ride was less risky than driving, despite having no seatbelt, no airbag and no other protective gear.

So I'm also particularly glad Apple doesn't restrict Crash Detection only to car accidents!

My Apple Watch still works but was scratched up pretty well

The fact that my watch and phone had been monitoring me for over a year without incident before a situation occurred where they literally could spring into action to save me is based entirely upon the idea that they are working in the background, not something I'd need to assume I needed. That's the right assumption to make. It literally saved me.

Crash Detection is a primary example of a new, innovative iOS feature update that adds tremendous value to the products I already use, without any real thinking on my part. It just works. And more importantly, it saved my life when it did.

Exercise your Emergency Contacts

Despite having an iPhone that's set up with a European phone number and home address, Crash Detection "just worked" here in the United States. It dialed the right number for the location where I crashed, and getting me help efficiently and quickly. That's great.

However, I realized after I woke up that I had two emergency contacts that should also have been notified. My phone did its job correctly, but in both cases I'd listed both my partner and a family member with old phone numbers they don't still use. That meant that Crash Detection had called the police for me, but wasn't able to notify my designated emergency contacts.

If you haven't taken a recent look at your emergency contact data, now might be a good time to check to make sure that everything is in order. Note that when you update a phone number, it doesn't necessarily "correct" your defined emergency contacts.

You may need to delete and reestablish your desired emergency contact and their phone number, as the system only calls the specific contact number you've supplied. It doesn't run through your contact trying each number you've ever entered for that person.

In my case, there was another Apple service that jumped in to help. Because I was sharing my location with iCloud, it was easy for my partner in another time zone, far away, to find out where I had been taken by using the Find My app, and then to call the hospital to find out my condition.

But if Crash Detection hadn't been working, I may not have survived-- or things could have ended up much worse: badly injured or even mugged while laying unconscious in a sketchy area in the middle of the night.

I'm not the only AppleInsider staffer whose life was saved by the Apple Watch, and I probably won't be the last. So thanks, Apple!

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