Henry T. Casey/CNN Underscored
There’s nothing like a good MacBook Pro sale, because Apple’s high-end laptops are as pricey as they are excellent. Hence, I’m excited to see that today’s deals feature one of the best laptops: the 14-inch MacBook Pro. This configuration with the M3 Pro chip matches at the lowest price we’ve ever seen for this model, with a $250-off discount. And since it may not last long, I’m writing this as fast as I can.
15% off
This configuration features the M3 Pro, a step-up from the entry-level M3 chip we’ve tested in both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, plus 18GB of memory and a 512GB SSD.
Read our review
As I wrote in my MacBook Pro M3 review, this generation of MacBooks thrives for the same reason as its predecessors: excellent performance, vibrant Liquid Retina XDR displays, strong sound and comfortable keyboards. This generation also offers hardware-based ray tracing and mesh shading, tricks that some gamers will love to hear and others will politely nod their heads at. This model runs on the M3 Pro chip, the one version of the CPU we haven’t tested. We’ve only seen the regular M3 and the super-fast M3 Max, so while we can’t say where its speed falls in between those, expect at least a slight bump up from the entry-level horsepower.
Additionally, this model features Apple’s new quite-attractive Space Black colorway, which offers a new fingerprint-resistant anodization to reduce smudging. In my testing, it proved decent (but not perfect) at that job. Still, if I’m buying one of the best MacBooks (and these have been my picks for years), I’d want to buy them in the best color option — which is Space Black.
If you don’t care about laptop color and could stand with last year’s still-capable M2 Pro chip (it’s just slightly slower, and still fast), I should note that B&H is also offering a $400-off discount on the M2 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro — knocking its price down to $1,599. That would leave you with an extra $150 in your pocket compared to the M3 Pro-equipped MacBook Pro.
One little detail I love about the M3 Pro and M2 Pro-based MacBook Pros is that they pack the superior set of USB-C ports. Not only do they include three of the reversible ports and not two, but you also get Thunderbolt 4 support. Those ports allow you to connect two 4K displays on a single port, rather than make you use one screen for each port like the Thunderbolt 3 ports in the MacBooks with regular M3 chips. To learn more about how Apple’s laptops stack up, check out my detailed MacBook Pro M3 vs MacBook Air M3 face-off.
