Apple did that "Scary Fast" event last Monday night, which is a weird choice of words for a company trying to sell you a $3,499 laptop, but fine. I watched it after dinner instead of live because I had a call that ran long, and honestly the streaming-at-5pm-Pacific thing is still strange to me even though they've done evening events a few times now. Anyway, the M3 chips are out, there's a new 24-inch iMac, and the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro line got refreshed. That's not really what I want to talk about though.
What I actually can't stop thinking about is the new color. Apple's calling it Space Black, and it's only available on the M3 Pro and M3 Max configs, not the base M3 model, which feels like a very Apple way of doing things (want the nice color? pay more). It's not black-black, it's this dark charcoal aluminum with a texturing process they say cuts down on fingerprints. We'll see. Every "fingerprint resistant" claim from every phone and laptop maker for the last decade has turned out to mean "resistant, not immune," and my hands are apparently unusually oily because I leave prints on things that are supposedly engineered to defeat me.
I had a black MacBook back in 2007. The plastic polycarbonate one, back when the black version cost $200 more than the white one for basically identical specs, which in retrospect was one of the more shameless upcharges Apple has ever pulled and that's saying something. That thing scratched if you looked at it wrong and picked up grime along the palm rests within a month. So there's a part of me that's a little skeptical of black Apple hardware on principle, even eighteen years and a totally different manufacturing process later. Old grudges die hard.
Pricing on the new lineup, for anyone keeping track: the 14-inch starts at $1,599 with the base M3 chip, no Space Black option at that tier, just Silver or the standard Space Gray. Step up to M3 Pro and you're at $1,999 and now Space Black is on the table. The 16-inch starts at $2,499 with M3 Pro and goes up from there depending on how much you want to spec into the M3 Max, RAM, and storage, at which point you can absolutely land north of $3,500 without trying that hard. I am not buying one of these right now. My M1 from three years ago still does everything I need it to do, and I've made myself a rule that I don't upgrade a laptop until the battery health drops below 80% or something actually stops working, which so far has kept me out of a lot of impulse purchases I would've regretted.
The chip stuff is the actual headline for most outlets, obviously. Apple's claiming the M3 family is built on a 3-nanometer process, first for a Mac, with better GPU performance and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which sounds like marketing copy chasing a gaming crowd that mostly isn't buying MacBooks anyway. I'll believe the real-world gains when I see benchmarks from people who aren't Apple, which take a week or two to show up after any of these announcements.
Small aside, only tangentially related: the FTX trial verdict came down Thursday, guilty on all seven counts, and I keep seeing that story and the MacBook stuff show up back to back in my feeds this week like the universe is doing some kind of clumsy juxtaposition of "here is what happens when tech goes well" and "here is what happens when it doesn't." Probably reading too much into scheduling coincidence there. Two unrelated news cycles just happened to land in the same few days.
Back to the laptop. If anyone reading this actually orders the Space Black 16-inch, email me and tell me how it looks after two weeks of actual use, because I want to know before I let this convince me my perfectly fine M1 needs replacing. The order page says shipping starts November 7th for most configs. I'll believe the smudge-resistance when a stranger's laptop in a coffee shop still looks clean a month from now, not before.