MacBook Pro 16 M3: What Real Users Say About RAM and Value

It definitely feels like there was a price jump this series with the base model starting at 8GB, so you have to pay a lot more just to get 16.

Apple has been hesitant to ship out M3 Pros for reviewers to test, because it's the most nerfed compared to its direct predecessor.

A €3000 laptop with 18 GB ram is also a joke. Anything under 32 is unacceptable at that rate.

I've sat on my couch not plugged in with my top spec M1 Pro and I get about 6 hours of video editing and rendering on just battery. Pretty impressive compared to a gaming laptop I have where you can literally watch the battery drop before your eyes while rendering.

Stupidly fantastic deal.

I've been PC all my life. Then a couple of years ago I got a Dell latitude with 16g of ram. Yes 16g was a mistake. But even so, that Dell is a total piece of shit. Fan is always on and photoshop crashes the system with minor editing. Battery life is about 1 hour and it goes black with zero warning. Build / quality problems everywhere. Paid just over $2k for it. Just switched to MacBook Pro M3 w 32g of memory. It is everything the Dell is not.

Shipping a 4K€ laptop for testing is kind of unfair since a huge portion of Pro users will never require the power of the Max. Another nonsense move was to remove the 1Tb default from the 16". You can get a 14" with 36 Gb of RAM and 1Tb but to get in store the 1 Tb on the 16" you need to purchase the M3 Max.

Currently waiting for my order. Any Pro or Max chip is a total overkill for my use, but I still wanted a Pro machine. Awesome to hear that the M3 Pro 16 inch is that efficient. Should still be overkill for my use in even five years time.

The one issue I never had was a low battery. The M1 Max was a workhorse in that way. It would go days between charges, sometimes over a week if work was light.

I have the 16 Pro Max that's always plugged in, so I had no idea how good the battery life was. Went to the office a few days ago and forgot the charger at home and was planning on asking people if they got a spare charger. Finished the working day on 25%. That's more than enough for me.

If you turn on power saving mode when you're doing light tasks the laptop runs forever at 50% brightness. I find myself doing that like twice a month so it's not a concern at all, battery life is phenomenal for the power these machines have while producing minimal heat and being completely silent.

My university was having a sale for 20% off older year models, then 50% off for demo floor models. They forgot to open this one and put it on the floor, but it was still marked as demo in the system so I paid demo price for a sealed one.

Still destroyed on Blender GPU by low end 4050 mobile.

The Mac user base will never cease to amaze me. Mac users, when M3 is announced: literally no one needs that much power. Also Mac users in regards to M3: Psh, you call that powerful? Look at how this other niche device trounces it for performance.

Bought my M3 Pro at launch and have been running it as my daily driver ever since. There was absolutely zero reason for me to go with the M4 when it came out. I'm confident that this machine will easily last another 5 - 6 years (or longer) before I have to consider another upgrade.

Yeah, that's a great deal. Especially if it's the M3 Pro, but even if not, you got the big one and plenty of RAM/Storage to last for a good while.

I've got the same spec the OP is looking at with 36GB of RAM and no complaints for any normal use case. It's been great working exclusively from a laptop instead of juggling a desktop and laptop like I did with Windows. Games eat up as many GPU cores as you can throw at them and I do have a bit of regret not getting the Max mostly for better native support for 3+ screens without needing DisplayLink.

It is still good and will be good enough for a long time, as long as you spec enough SSD and ram for your usecase. BUT m4 has a very significant uplift in efficiency, if the price is not too different, and m4 pro with same specs will be a better pick long-term.

For the Mac I would suggest at least 32gb ram, instead of M3 try looking at old M1 Max or M2 Max refurbished or used, go for 64GB/1TB config, this would provide you a good balance of power and memory.

Recently I was looking into getting a new MacBook after my m1's screen cracked and god damn man when did these get so expensive. I got my m1 for like 1099 before tax and now the cheapest one I could find new at the store was like 1499.

My only complain is the lack of Wi-Fi 7. Considering that a laptop lasts several years, would be great if it comes with the latest Wi-Fi tech.

I've got m3 pro 18gb ram and 512 ssd, returned within 14 days for a 36gb 1gb, and I'm happy. Core updates are the next step after ram and ssd, but it is heavily personalized — I don't need cores so I kept the default.

Micro Center has some insane discounts sometimes. I was eyeballing an M3 Max 16/40 with 64gb/1tb and it was $2,800 bucks. But you had to buy it in store.

The jump from intel to M was amazing, the jumps since have been mid at best. I use an m1max at home and an M2 Max at work and I can't tell the difference.

Happy with my newly purchased refurb base 16" M1 Pro direct from Apple, they nailed it with the first in-house gen processors imo. Have a PC for more power, the M3s seem solid upgrades though.

AI workloads are memory intensive. 16 gb may limit the models you can run. Suggest you get more ram as you can't add more later... imagine 2 yrs from now, we can't tell if an 8b model will suffice for testing.

I hit the RAM limit pretty quickly with 4 full VMs but you can stay under 16gb with containers and that workload. Honestly if you're working with that many containers and LLAMA, you should consider hosting them in the cloud. M series chips can't build x86 images and you can acquire more resources remotely.

That same system in an M4 would have been faster for sure, but it would have been over $5500 with tax vs ~4,200. Big difference in price unless you REALLY need the latest and 15-25% performance boost. I was waiting on M4 but for that price difference, I jumped on it as well. Brand new, in hand, no gimmicks.

That's a great deal, especially if it's brand new. I've been a Windows user since the 3.1 days, and while I don't think I will ever give it up entirely, I do have an interest in getting a Macbook Pro. I have a Mac mini that I recently got, and I like it. I would love to find a deal this good for a M3 or M4 machine with that much memory and storage.

Coming from PC I purchased a refurbished 16" Macbook Pro M3pro (black, obviously) from Nov '23, in an awesome condition. Works like a charm. For Media Design, Audio (Ableton Live 12) and games (Tomb Raider, Alien Isolation, Borderlands 2, etc). Never going back! I feel I'm good for at least 3 years.

The battery life is amazing with lightweight workloads. Unfortunately when doing anything more it becomes fairly mediocre. With my normal dev work it lasts about 2-3 hours at best.

100% 36GB of ram. Just returned the 18GB model because it was using 15GB when I was doing VERY VERY casual tasks... if I were to add your workload it would start memswap and I am personally not okay with that.

I can confirm that 18 Gb Ram will not be enough, I run less than that and run out of ram.

Given your intended usage, both now and in the future, you would likely benefit from upgraded ram. If it's too much of a stretch to get the 36gb M3pro, you could look at refurb M2pro with 32gb. The performance difference between the two isn't massive, especially in multithreaded workloads.

It's full beast mode, have never seen more than 26% of ram used. Someday, but not today.

Very good deal! I just purchased an M3 Pro / 36GB RAM / 1TB SSD for 1.8k. Apple Refurbished item so paid a small premium.

Several cables tried for 4K60Hz, and used the same set of 3-4 cables and same monitors on my Dell Latitude 5440 from work — all of them handle 4k60 no problem. The issue is specific to the MacBook Pro M3.

Performance and efficiency aside, I just can't stand the new style of trackpad… my wife has the 15 inch air, and both her and I find it incredibly difficult to click and drag files around, and accidentally clicking on shit that we didn't mean to.

I'm actually writing this from my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, the 16 inch variant, and its great!

I got the Pro in the end. Amazing machine performance-wide. I would just have preferred a thinner form factor, but that's secondary for a 16.

I'd agree with others who are recommending an older M1 or M2 series MacBook with more RAM would be the best use of your budget. I have M1 Pro 16GB and I've filled the ram with much less than that.

It's efficient, I never said otherwise. But an equally priced premium windows machine with an i7 and 4070 upwards you can get will destroy it in every way. Double the RAM, double the storage, upgradeability, repairability, performance, API support, gaming, 3d apps, AI, rendering, Photoshop, etc. M3 can last longer unplugged, Mac ecosystem and a great screen.

I got a 13" 2015 MacBook Pro in 2020, and I've used exclusively Mac since then. I have a literal stack of 8 Windows laptops my parents have given me to either fix or recover data from in the last 3-5 years. Windows laptops, even the expensive ones, just do NOT last as long as Macs, even when they were on Intel chips.