Apple M3 Max MacBook outperforms pricey Mac Studio in early benchmarks

Early benchmarking scores for the M3 Max MacBook Pro have leaked online, and it’s performing just as well as the more expensive Apple Mac Studio.

The new M3 chip lineup is here and it brings solid improvements as compared to the M2 and M1 generation. Apple’s new silicon will power the new MacBook Pros, which will be available for purchase on November 7.

Apple’s new chipsets come in three configurations— M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. As you’d guess from the names, the M3 Max is the most powerful chipset among the three. And if the early benchmarks are to be trusted, the M3 Max’s performance is on the line with the M2 Ultra, which powers the $4000 Mac Studio.

Apple M3 Max is ridiculously powerful

Apple

As reported by MacRumors, the first benchmark results for Apple’s M3 Max chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today. The listed chip appears to be for the 16-inch MacBook Pro and it scores 21084 points in the multi-core test.

This makes the M3 Max as fast as the M2 Ultra, which has an average multi-core score of 21,316 in the Mac Studio. The latter is priced at $3,999, almost $500 more than the new 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with M3 Max chip.

When you compare the chip with the last generation M2 Max, you see around 45 percent performance improvement— Apple claimed 50 percent, but since these are early scores, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Apple has managed to achieve an impressive feat with the M3 Max. You get all this power packed inside a fairly thin and light laptop, which runs silent and gets an 18-hour battery life.

The standard M3 chip was also benchmarked recently on Geekbench and it managed to live up to Apple’s claims.