Last month I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M3 Pro - 16GB RAM, 512 GB. Here is an honest review of my experience. The chassis of both the machines are exactly th

Last month I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M3 Pro - 16GB RAM, 512 GB. Here is an honest review of my experience. The chassis of both the machines are exactly the same. The bad thing about that is the newer MacBooks come with a matte finish for the keyboard and the finish wears off like in just 3 weeks even with proper care. As a matter of fact, in the newer machine, I used ISP 70% with water to wipe it off after each use thinking it was due to grease/oil from the fingers. However the finish still wore off, suggesting that it has more to do with the finish itself. With that out of the way, I maintain a very large site with over 50,000 posts in a static site setup. It is built on a Phoenix/Elixir setup I wrote from scratch and has been serving my client well without hiccups for the last 5 years. From time to time, some of the writers may mess up something and they would want us to run a sweep occasionally - back track to the last X number of posts and re-publish them. Usually about 100-500 posts which covers a few weeks/months worth of posts depending on the run. So, for a 100 post sweep, the M3 pro was slightly faster, by an order of magnitude of over 1.5x. But, for other everyday tasks, like say opening Affinity Designer/Photo and editing files, I didn't notice much improvements. And Apple's website is notoriously deceptive about the improvements. Their graphs always showcase comparisons with a top specc'ed M3 machine with a base M1 variant or M2 which makes no sense to me as a developer. Disk (SSD) speeds were slightly slower on the M3 than on my old M1 variant. But, I am unable to attribute it to the processor as it could be a bad driver or software version. For those interested, it is one of those internal Samsung SSDs connected via a SATA-USBC converter. Long story short, if you are on M2 - Not worth upgrading. If you are on an M1 or M1 Pro, you can still hold on to it a bit longer, the only reason you would want to upgrade is if you got a good deal like me. I sold my 21' M1 Pro for almost $1800 US (it still had Apple care) and got a student discount (I'm in the middle of some certification programs) on the new M3 Pro, so I got it. If I didn't have these financial incentives, probably wouldn't have been worth upgrading. Hope this helps someone.