• iStore South Africa has gone live with pre-orders for its latest M3-powered MacBook Pro and iMac hardware.
• The MacBook Pro is the more expensive of the two, starting at R37 499 for the 14″ MacBook Pro with M3.
• The most expensive option is the 16″ MacBook Pro with M3 Max, 1TB SSD, 48GB Unified Memory, and iCare Plus.

Last week Apple revealed its “scary fast” new hardware, all powered by its latest M3 silicon. Now those devices are available for pre-order locally, as iStore South Africa has gone live with pre-orders for both the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro, as well as the 24″ iMac.

All three devices are listed to ship to customers on 10th November, so the Cupertino-based company is wasting no time in getting its new hardware into the hands of consumers before the year’s end.

While that is a lot to stomach, it is quite tame compared to what the pre-order pricing on the new MacBook Pros is. To that end, for the 14″ model, pricing starts at R37 499, rising to R80 498 if you opt for the maximum storage, RAM, M3 Max chip, and iCare Plus.

In usual Apple fashion, the pricing is double take inducing, with pricing for the 24″ iMac starting at R33 799. Depending on what specification and configuration you opt for on the latest All-In-One desktop offering from Apple, the pre-order price could rise to R44 299.

If that still is not making you bat an eyelid, the 16″ flavour starts at R58 499, with either the M3 Pro or M3 Max offered in terms of chipset options. Should you go for the highest spec offering, which includes a 1TB SSD, a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 4GB Unified Memory, and an iCare Plus warranty, it will total R100 998.

That is a lot of cheddar, but Apple is claiming that the M3 family, and in particular the Max variant, can handle pretty much anything thrown at it, and that it is also suited for intense gaming, along with the usual video editing and machine learning work that these Pro-grade notebooks are intended for.

“The 40-core GPU is up to 50 percent faster than M1 Max, and support for up to 128GB of unified memory allows AI developers to work with even larger transformer models with billions of parameters. The 16-core CPU features 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, achieving astonishing performance that’s up to 80 percent faster than M1 Max,” noted Apple of the M3 Max’s performance.

“And with two ProRes engines, M3 Max makes video post-production work on even the highest-resolution content fast and fluid, whether using DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro. M3 Max is designed for pros needing the highest performance available in a MacBook Pro with industry-leading battery life in a pro laptop,” it added.

Is this overkill? Perhaps. Will it cost you a lot of money? Undoubtedly.