y2an

There are twin goals here. First, to differentiate better the Air range from the Pro which will reduce consumer confusion and allow more targeted pricing differentiation (against low end x86 laptops). Second, to fend off Meteor Lake which is imminent from Intel. Had the M3 launched after Meteor Lake, it would not look so compelling. 

Along with this they cleared out the Touchbar 13" model which I had suspected had been kept for corporate users, and replaced it with a a base M3 14" Pro aimed at the same audience; remember, big company developers don't need massive power for builds as they use server farms. So they cleaned up the product lines very nicely. 

Then, they pitched this at Intel Mac users who are approaching upgrade time. Several mentions throughout of comparisons to those models to drive home the point.

Finally they continued to drive home their gaming creds with the re-architected GPU, throwing in Dynamic Caching to boot. What is that? Well, we await more, but I suspect this simplifies game ports by eliminating the need to produce new builds targeted on different GPU core quantities including having the OS dynamically allocate GPU cores as needed while reserving those not needed for other tasks; but, well, this is only a guess.