Apple October Event recap: M3 MacBook Pro, new M3 iMac and all the ‘scary fast’ news

Apple's 'Scary Fast' event unleashed a slew of new M3-powered Macs upon us, including a new M3 iMac and M3 MacBook Pros that now come in a new color: Space Black.

While that was the biggest unexpected announcement in what was otherwise a very brief event full of new products we'd heard rumors about for weeks, the new M3 Macs are a big deal.

Here's a quick overview of everything that was announced during the big Apple event on All Hallow's Eve, as well as links to our full coverage of the new chips and Macs. Below that you'll find our liveblog full of even more details and fun pictures from the event.

And check back soon, as we'll be bringing you our hands-on reports of what it's like to use these new Macs and see the M3 family of chips in action!

Apple October event announcements

The new family of Apple M3 chips were announced with a lot of emphasis on how much faster they are than Apple's industry-shaking M1 chips, as well as how they match the performance of competing chips from Intel while draining far less power. 

The fact that they're more powerful than their predecessors is easy to believe since they're the first 3nm Mac chips, and they have what Apple calls a "next-generation" GPU with support for modern graphical tech like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. The new M3 chips also offer a new feature called Dynamic Caching, which dynamically allocates the exact amount of memory needed for specific tasks. According to Apple, this feature is an industry first and should improve your experience when gaming and doing other complex tasks by optimizing performance.

More powerful versions of the M3 power the new MacBook Pro with M3 Pro and M3 Max, which Apple claims is monstrously better than its predecessors at demanding tasks like cutting video and coding applications. The 14-inch Pro starts at $1,599, while its larger 16-inch sibling starts at $2,499. 

These new 14-inch and 16-inch Pros look likely to be far more powerful and more power-efficient than their predecessors thanks to the advancements of the M3 chip, but we'll have to get some into our testing lab to find out!

We also met the new iMac M3, reportedly up to 2x faster than its predecessor and clearly marketed by Apple at families, students and others looking to do less heavy-duty coding and more homework and light gaming. 

We loved the original Apple iMac (24-inch), so the fact that this new one looks much the same (right down to the thin 24-inch 4.5K display and six-speaker sound system) isn't a bad thing—and the upgrade to M3 may deliver a significant performance increase.

These new Macs become available starting Tuesday November 7, but you can pre-order them right now.

• Where to buy the M3 iMac
• Where to buy the M3 MacBook Pros

Also, we learned the 13-inch MacBook Pro is discontinued and effectively dead now that these new MacBooks have arrived. 

Written by

Written by

Alex Wawro

Hey there, I'm Alex Wawro and I'll be keeping you company through Apple's "Scary Fast" event. I help with computing coverage here at Tom's Guide and have reviewed a fair number of Macs myself, so I'll do my best to help bring you the most accurate, useful and up-to-date information about today's Macstravaganza!