Want the top-of-the-range MacBook Pro 16-inch from Apple’s freshly revealed M3-toting lineup of laptops? You can guess that it’ll cost you dearly, but the exact price tag for a fully loaded 16-inch model will likely surprise you.
Cue drum roll… the price is $7,200 in the US if you max out all the upgrades with the MacBook Pro 16-inch, meaning you specify 128GB of RAM (so you need to plump for the M3 Max chip to get this option) and an 8TB SSD.
The base price is $4,000, with those upgrades nearly doubling the cost of the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 Pro (the SSD is the major upgrade cost, at $2,200, whereas the additional memory weighs in at an extra grand).
In the UK, that maxed-out model is £7,300 compared to the base model which runs to £4,100, pretty much identical to the US. And in Australia, the most expensive outlay is AU$11,700 which is a hefty chunk more than the base asking price of AU$6,900 (but actually slightly less of a markup, percentage-wise, than the US and UK).
Whatever the case, as MacRumors, which flagged this up, points out, the old top-end MacBook 16-inch used to run up to $6,500 in the US, so the new version is considerably more expensive (over 10% more).
Analysis: A premium ask and then some
You didn’t think packing out a MacBook Pro 16-inch with the fastest M3 chip along with 128GB of RAM – a new option, replacing the top memory configuration of 96GB with the previous M2 Max-powered version – would be cheap, did you? (Indeed, in the M1 generation, the top RAM loadout was 64GB, so these are big strides forward memory-wise).
Apple famously charges quite the premium for these memory and storage upgrades, so why would the new M3 models prove an exception? They wouldn’t, and haven’t.
It’s the storage cost that really bites hard here, though, and by dropping down the size of the SSD to 4TB, you can save a lot (and more than halve the cost of an upgrade to the 8TB model, in fact).
Folks (and indeed perhaps more to the point, companies) buying MacBooks at this level of performance, mind, are going to have pretty well-stuffed wallets (and they’ll be needed).
How much does the top-spec (128GB / 8TB) MacBook Pro 14-inch cost with the priciest M3 Max option? $6,900 in the US, so it’s a bit cheaper, but not all that much. (In the UK, it’s £7,000, and in Australia it’s AU$11,150).
Apple’s new MacBook Pros go on sale on November 7, just under a week away now.