Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro has straddled the line between high-end consumer laptop and capable professional machine since its introduction, showing up as often in offices and media studios as it does in homes and dorm rooms. It's a true prosumer laptop, with options ranging from basic (the more affordable M3-powered model) to overpowered (the M3 Max monster). In the middle sits the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro (starting at $1,599; $1,999 as tested). We give high marks to the M3 Pro-powered MacBook Pro 14 for class-leading performance and sublime build quality, but it's truly incredible 30 hours of battery life that make it a cinch for our Editors' Choice award this year.
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Configurations: From Basic to Bonkers
The 14-inch MacBook Pro is the widest-ranging laptop in the Mac lineup, available with the basic M3 processor, the middle M3 Pro, and even the monstrous M3 Max. The prices are similarly varied, starting at $1,599 for the M3 base model and scaling up to a 16-core M3 Max, which costs $3,699 with no upgrades to memory and storage.
The $1,599 base model comes with an eight-core M3 CPU, a 10-core GPU, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of solid-state storage. Upgrades are available for 16GB or 24GB of RAM and larger storage up to 2TB, taking the price up to $2,599.
The model we reviewed is a step up, with an 11-core M3 Pro chip with 14 GPU cores, 18GB of memory, and a 512GB drive—all for $1,999. Like all of the 14-inch models discussed here, it comes with a 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, a 70-watt charger, plenty of ports, and a built-in Magic Keyboard and Force Touch trackpad.
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Apple also sells a 12-core version of the 14-inch M3 Pro laptop, which additionally has an 18-core GPU and a full 1TB of storage for $2,399. Both of these M3 Pro configurations can be set up with up to 36GB of memory and as much as 4TB of SSD storage, but you'll pay more for those extras.
If you need to step up to a professional workstation but keep the same 14-inch design, you can also get the M3 Max 14-core CPU with a 30-core GPU, 36GB of memory, and 1TB storage for $3,199. This can also be configured with up to 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, up to 128GB of memory, and up to an 8TB SSD. You'll pay a pretty penny for this version, however, which sells for $6,899.
That's a huge $5,300 price difference between the top and bottom configurations, but it also means that, no matter what your needs, you can find a version of the MacBook Pro 14 that has the hardware to match—provided you can afford it.
Design: Smudge-Free Space Black
If your first thoughts of Mac laptops include white plastic, you're a couple of decades out of date. The name of the game for Apple laptops is aluminum, with bare metal construction and a few options for anodized finishes: Silver, Space Gray, and the new Space Black.
Measuring 0.61 by 12.31 by 8.71 inches and weighing 3.5 pounds, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is compact, but a bit heavy for an ultraportable laptop, which we prefer to be under the 3-pound mark. The less powerful 13-inch MacBook Air features that sort of ultralight design you'll want for carrying a laptop between classes or slipping into a carry-on for a business trip. But if you need more power, the extra ounces within the MacBook Pro 14 are well worth it.
Our review unit comes in the Space Black color scheme, which looks cool, but also has the benefit of better resistance to fingerprints on the metal chassis thanks to a new anodization process. It comes with a color-matched power cable, so the MagSafe charger will blend right in with whatever finish you choose. Sadly, Apple doesn't make color-matched power bricks to go with these cables—it's still the white plastic of the mid-2000s.
MacBook Pro Ports: Now With Extra Thunderbolt
All versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro have a MagSafe charging port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left side of the chassis. On the right is an HDMI output for connecting to a TV or monitor and an SDXC card slot for grabbing photos or video from a camera memory card. But only the M3 Pro and Max versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro include a bonus third Thunderbolt 4 port, which means an extra connection with charging, DisplayPort support, and up to 40Gbps data throughput.
With the extra port also comes expanded monitor support. The M3 base model supports just one external display with up to 6K resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. But the M3 Pro configuration with the extra Thunderbolt port adds support for a second 6K 60Hz monitor, plus an additional 4K resolution monitor at 144Hz. And, if you really want mind-blowing resolution or speed, you can also opt to run a single external display, but at 8K resolution and 60Hz or a single 4K monitor at 240Hz, which is ideal for gaming or video content work.
Wireless connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, giving you the best (and current) standards for networking and accessories.
A (Mostly) Stunning Display
As it should, the MacBook Pro 14 comes with one of the better laptop screens on the market, the 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display. With a resolution of 3,024 by 1,964 pixels (254 pixels per inch), it's extremely close to full 4K.
What sets the Liquid Retina XDR display apart from most laptop screens is a combination of technologies. First, the MacBook Pro has an IPS panel, which is not uncommon, but as those panels go, it's high in quality. Broad color coverage and excellent detail come standard. Behind that panel are thousands of mini LEDs for backlighting, which provide higher brightness, deeper contrast, and tighter control for HDR effects, leading Apple to coin the term XDR for Extreme Dynamic Range. While I think Apple gets a bit heavy-handed with the feature branding, the fact remains that the display provides OLED-like contrast and ultra-bright highlights better than most laptop displays on the market.
Apple's other cool screen technology is its ProMotion automatic refresh rate adjustment. Most displays are locked into their refresh rates, whether that's 60Hz or 120Hz. A few feature adaptive refresh technologies that can adjust the refresh rate for smoother gaming performance, and Apple has applied similar tech to adjust the refresh rates based on your on-screen actions, whether it's scrolling through a document, watching streaming shows, gaming, or rendering high-refresh-rate animations. First seen in smartphones, the result is buttery smooth, stutter-free visuals for everything, and it's just as stunning from a laptop screen.
The one thing Windows laptops have that Apple laptops don't, however, is touch-screen tech. If you want to tap, swipe, and gesture, you can use the big trackpad or pick up an iPhone or iPad, but MacBooks don't have a touch-screen option. I may harp on this in all of my Mac reviews, but only because it continues to feel like a glaring omission on Apple's part. Even cheap Chromebooks have touch screens these days, and it's kind of wild that Apple doesn't even offer its paltry TouchBar feature anymore, divisive as it was.
Touch support aside, Apple makes a slick-looking display and pairs it with excellent sound. You'll hear six speakers secreted away inside the MacBook Pro 14, and they're set up to drive surprisingly big sound. The up- and down-firing woofers and tweeters are paired in a force-canceling configuration, which lets the MacBook pump out more sound and do so with less energy expenditure. Plus, Apple's multi-speaker array supports spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos, making everything sound larger and more realistic. You should still probably rely on your AirPods or other headphones for superior sound, but the speaker quality is strong enough for when you want to kick back with a movie or share some tunes.
Using the 14-Inch MacBook Pro: Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam
When it comes to the most essential features of a laptop, Apple has the basics on lock. Apple's Magic Keyboard provides a steady typing experience, with a snappy feel and legible keys enhanced by an automatic backlight. The 1mm key travel feels a bit shallow compared with some other modern laptops—like the 1.5mm on the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8—but it's not a deal breaker. The keyboard also has full-size function keys and a fingerprint reader in the power button to make secure login with Touch ID as convenient as possible.
The accompanying trackpad is even better, with a spacious glass-covered haptic sensor that provides plenty of room to swipe and touch, and Force Touch pressure-sensitive controls for using contextual tools and advanced gestures.
Then we come to the webcam: Apple's 1080p FaceTime camera is serviceable enough, if on a par with any other premium laptop. Dedicated video processing is meant to enhance the webcam with features like Center Stage, which automatically follows you to keep you in center frame, along with additional image improvements.
These features sometimes look cool and helpful, but just as often look a little unnatural. Apple's solution for a better camera experience is literally using an iPhone instead, which has the drawback of monopolizing your phone. The other issue is the notch, a carve-out in the middle of the top border of the display panel that squeezes the webcam in without requiring a thicker top bezel for the display. Though I'm not as irritated by it as I have been in the past, the logic is still goofy to me. Giving up a portion of the lovely display instead of adding a couple of millimeters to the top bezel seems like a bad trade-off, but it's pretty easy to ignore.
Testing the 14-Inch MacBook Pro: Built for Work and Play
Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro falls right into the same category as several of our favorite premium laptops, driving high-end processor performance and a rich feature set in an elegant slim design. For benchmark comparisons, we selected a few such top models, like the elegant Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 2-in-1, the business-ready HP Dragonfly G4, and the 14-inch Dell Precision 5470 workstation. All feature high-end processors, a range of graphics options, and prices that aren't too dissimilar to one of the many versions of MacBook Pro 14 you can buy.
We also wanted to see how it stacks up against other Apple laptops, like the MacBook Air 15-Inch, the now-discontinued MacBook Pro 13-Inch (2022, M2), and the previous top MacBook Pro model, the MacBook Pro 16-Inch (2023, M2 Max), to see how well the M3 Pro does with its enhanced performance. This range of comparisons should make it pretty easy to see which tier of MacBook is right for you, and whether it's time to upgrade to this newer model.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We use a number of tests in our evaluations, designed to measure everything from peak processing power to battery life. You can get a decent idea of what we're running on our test bench in our guide to how we test laptops, but Apple machines use a slightly different mix of software than we use on Windows machines. Because some of our standard tests are Windows-only and several of the best Apple-silicon-friendly tests aren't available for PC laptops, we're left to mix and match tests to compare Apples to Apples and Apples to Windows.
First, we start with a trio of cross-platform tests: HandBrake 1.4, Cinebench R23, and Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro. In our HandBrake video transcoding test, we use the open-source video utility to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Cinebench R23 then uses Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, to test multi-core and multi-threaded processing. After that, we have a processor-intensive test in Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro by Primate Labs, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.
Finally, we run Adobe Photoshop under Rosetta 2. While Photoshop does run natively on both M1- and M2-based Macs, this model refused to install our test. We will keep trying to produce a reliable result and update this review once we're successful.
In HandBrake, the MacBook Pro 14 turned in a faster time than any of the Windows and Intel-based competitors by a large margin. However, what was more interesting was how it fared against other Macs. The M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro was nearly two minutes faster, but the previous year's M2 Max led by only 26 seconds. That's close enough that less demanding video editors might find their needs met by the more affordable M3 Pro than last year's workstation-grade M2 Max.
Cinebench and Geekbench scores again put the M3 Pro-powered MacBook Pro 14 within spitting distance of the 2022 M2 Max, and even edged ahead of the Dell Precision 5470, the competing mobile workstation on the Windows side. But if you want truly leading performance, the new M3 Max-based MacBook Pro 16 dominates with roughly a 10,000-point lead in both tests. All told, this 14-inch model is clearly competitive with not just its predecessors but also contemporary workstations.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For an Apple-specific graphics test, we use 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme, running in Unlimited mode. Unlike our usual 3DMark tests, Wild Life runs natively on Apple Silicon, letting us measure graphics performance among different Mac systems. The higher the score, the better.
For cross-platform testing, we use a version of our standard GFXBench test, here running on Apple’s Metal graphics API. It stress-tests both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two subtests, Aztec Ruins (1440p), which relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), and Car Chase (1080p), which uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.
In the Mac-specific (for our testing) Wild Life Extreme, the M3 Pro-based MacBook Pro 14 landed right between the high-powered M2 and M3 Max chips and the more basic M2-based Air and defunct 13-inch MacBook Pro. This is where we expected the M3 Pro to land, threading the needle between basic and Max, but still driving enough performance to tempt any Mac owners with first- and second-gen chips to upgrade.
The more interesting results were in the cross-platform GFXBench tests, where even the basic M2-powered models still handily beat the flagship Windows laptops, and even pulled ahead of the Dell mobile workstation, despite its Nvidia RTX A1000 (4GB) dedicated GPU.
Just as interesting were the well-above-playable frame rates in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Despite falling in the middle of the Apple pack, they indicate that the M3 Pro is actually a thoroughly capable option for gaming on Mac, something we intend to look into further with additional testing.
Workstation Performance
Going a step beyond the usual gaming or media processing tests, we also fired up the seminal Blender utility to see how well this MacBook Pro could handle true 3D rendering. Using the open-source 3D suite, we record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photorealistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU, and the other relying on the GPU. It's a test we reserve for the most powerful machines.
While the MacBook Pro 14 with M3 Pro isn't meant to be a screaming-fast workstation the way an M3 Max-equipped system is, our Blender tests show that it still has the chops to take on demanding workflows. It didn't have the best scores, but the MacBook Pro beat out the Dell Precision 5470, making it a more than capable option for anyone looking to get a Mac for programming or STEM work. Even if you can't shell out the thousands it costs to get the fully loaded Max Mac, the middle MacBook Pro 14 will still do the job, without even requiring upgraded RAM.
Battery and Display Tests
For its M3 processors, Apple claims some impressive energy efficiency, promising as much as 22 hours of battery life. Obviously, we were going to test these claims, but I am most eager to see how the system would balance the power demands of the muscular CPU and GPU with the efficiency needed for long-lasting mobility.
We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Apple claims that the new MacBook Pro will last 22 hours in battery tests, but we found that isn't accurate. In our video rundown test, the 14-inch Pro lasted even longer, crossing the 30-hour threshold, becoming the longest-lasting laptop we've ever tested. That it does so while driving increased processing and graphics performance over the previous long-lasting model is all the more impressive.
The display on the 14-inch MacBook Pro is superb as usual. However, in terms of raw color gamut coverage, it falls a few percentage points shy of what we've seen on past models. The Liquid Retina XDR achieves a rock-solid 100% of the sRGB gamut, but only 93% of the DCI-P3 color space.
We got similar results on the new MacBook Pro 16 and on the 2022 MacBook Pro 13, so these aren't unusual figures. We're just used to seeing scores in the 99% and 100% range from this and competing products, so it's worth considering and investigating if your work revolves around these color gamuts.
Verdict: The New 14-Inch Mobile Workstation to Beat
Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro strikes an uncommon balance that you could call a "prosumer workstation." It drives competitive power for media creation and editing, not to mention gaming potential and daily productivity, but in a price range that isn't far off from flagship Windows machines with less power. It's still nowhere near budget-friendly, but this model is thousands less than the top-tier 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max and nearly as powerful as last year's M2 Max-equipped model. That's a ton of power and performance for the price, making it a compelling choice for both professional and amateur creatives. Sure, we wish it had gained a touch screen and lost the screen notch, but most Apple shoppers won't be put off by either. With class-leading productivity and graphics performance backed by jaw-dropping 30-hour battery life, this MacBook Pro easily earns our Editors' Choice award among compact workstations.
Apple's 2023 14-inch MacBook Pro strikes a winning balance between premium design and M3 Pro-powered performance, for a compact mobile workstation that trounces similarly priced Windows machines.
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