All the news from Apple’s “Scary Fast” Mac event

Apple’s “Scary Fast” showcase has come to a close. During the launch event, Apple took the wraps off of some brand-new Macs that come equipped with the latest version of the company’s in-house chip.

If you’re curious about all the new products, here’s a roundup of the major announcements from the event.

It’s 2023, and I have a port complaint. Apple’s “Scary Fast” event came and went, and new M3-powered iMacs were born. Yet there was a curious tidbit the company didn’t mention: the Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad still have Lightning ports. In a USB-C iPhone world, what is that old port still doing there?

It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that Apple didn’t update the crucial accessories. Tim Cook is like a supply-chain-and-logistics Legolas, always ready with a quiver full of old products and designs to maximize their value to Apple. Often, that’s a good thing for customers, too. It means there are iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches with years-old designs but solid performance at more downright affordable prices.

The Touch Bar was too ahead of its time. This happens occasionally. We finally reach the point we can make a really cool idea technologically feasible but not feasible enough for widespread adoption. Think 3D TVs or augmented reality headsets. The Touch Bar, which is no longer available on any Mac sold by Apple, was like that. A really cool idea, executed pretty well, and never embraced by anyone but us diehards.

When the Touch Bar launched, it felt like touching the future. It was an OLED strip that recognized touch and replaced the function row of keys on the 2016 MacBook Pro. You could easily scrub through video and audio files in QuickTime. You could choose really pretty bookmark buttons in Safari. Preview had a whole array of useful buttons, too. The Touch Bar was itself a gorgeous set of buttons that changed depending on context, and it felt like the contextual menus of iOS brought into the physical world.

Apple’s first foray into the world of prime-time product launches (for those of us on the East Coast, that is) kicked off with a new generation of Apple Silicon, the M3 processor. And announced alongside the new M3 chips were the handful of computers Apple is putting them in — including a new 24-inch iMac, an upgraded 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro, and a new 14-inch MacBook Pro with a base M3 that kills off the controversial Touch Bar for good (pour one out for an Apple flop).

This may have been a somewhat low-stakes Apple event for the evening before Halloween, but even if none of these new Macs are radically different, a new generation of M-series chips is nothing to sneeze at. The $1,299 iMac shows that Apple hasn’t totally forgotten about its all-in-one desktop (even if it continues to dash our hopes of getting another 27-inch model). The new $1,599 MacBook Pro 14 with M3, meanwhile, makes the laptop with the good ports more attainable (albeit, with less RAM). Then, there’s the $1,999 MacBook Pro 14 and $2,499 MacBook Pro 16, both of which are receiving an annual yet entirely welcome spec bump.

Alongside a refreshed iMac and new entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro featuring the M3 chip (and sans Touch Bar), Apple is introducing upgraded models of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro and M3 Max processors today. Design-wise, they retain the exact same look and port layout as their predecessors but now come in a new “space black” color that replaces space gray.

The machines raise the bar in several ways, ranging from sheer performance to configurability. For example, the M3 Max MacBook Pro can be ordered with up to 128GB of RAM — a new high for Apple’s laptops. Preorders start today, and M3 Pro models will be available on November 7th. M3 Max units will take a bit longer to ship and are due to arrive sometime later in November.

Apple is unveiling its new M3 processors today, and all three include big improvements to the GPU side of the chips. The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max will all offer faster CPU performance, but crucially, the M3 family of chips will include significant changes to the GPU to improve professional apps and gaming performance. All three M3 chips will debut in new MacBook Pro models, with the M3 also part of a new 24-inch iMac.

The base M3 includes an eight-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, and Apple claims it’s up to 35 percent faster than the M1 for CPU performance. We don’t know exactly how the M3 compares to the M2, but when Apple announced the M2 last year, it said it had 18 percent faster CPU performance over the M1. The M3 also has a 10-core GPU with a next-gen architecture that is said to be 65 percent faster than the M1 for graphics performance. The M3 supports up to 24GB of unified memory and one external display (in addition to the one built into iMacs and MacBooks).

The 24-inch iMac is finally getting a refresh. At its “Scary Fast” event, Apple announced a new M3 version of the iMac that is supposedly two times faster than its over two-year-old M1 predecessor.

What’s really new this time around is the M3 chip. The M3 has an eight-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, with support for up to 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. Supposedly, that ought to translate to a much faster all-in-one. Productivity apps, such as Safari or Microsoft Excel, will run up to 30 percent faster. For creators, the new chip enables up to 12 streams of 4K video, and Adobe Photoshop should also process photos up to two times faster. It also now supports Wi-Fi 6E.

Apple is finally moving on from the Touch Bar. The company has just announced a new entry-level version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, replacing the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar keyboard. This new model has the standard M3 chip; the 14-inch model previously was only available with the higher-end Pro or Max chips.

The biggest news about this new MacBook Pro is the M3 chip. As rumored, the M3 is a 3nm chip, and Apple is promising some big performance improvements over the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro, including Final Cut Pro rendering that’s up to 60 percent faster. As usual, Apple only shared some selective performance stats, so it’s not entirely clear how much of a jump this new chip might have compared to the old M1 model, let alone the M2.