Apple

Cost. You get more bandwidth by having more interconnect which takes up die space which means you get fewer per wafer and lower your yield. TSMCs N3 process is very expensive and is rumored to be dealing with yield issues as well.

Consumers aren’t going to spend more money for memory bandwidth. Nobody cares; the target market for the Pro is not people who want every last 1% of performance.

The 25% less bandwidth is related to the 25% fewer performance core count (8 to 6), in favor of efficiency cores (4 to 6).

Odds are Apple looked at real world usage of the Pro chips and found that performance cores were rarely fully utilized while efficiency cores were, so it made sense to shift the design. And with fewer performance cores, you need less memory bandwidths

This whole thread is full of poeple who couldn’t even explain why memory bandwidth is important (hint: doubling bandwidth will haze zero impact on performance unless it was the bottleneck).

Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?

Maybe upon further testing they've noticed he bandwidth is never going to be utilized with base M1/M2 specs, hence they were able to lower it without impacting end-user experience. So lowering production cost without any impact. But that's a big maybe.

Clearly they're trying to cut costs to bring it closer to the new M3 Base MBP (also happens to be closer in performance too). They're trying to upsell people to the Pro (it's a little cheaper than the M2 Pro was).

As a sidenote this is also why the pricing for the M3 Base makes exactly 0 sense (adding the 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD that should have been standard for £1700 makes it the same price as the Pro where I live).

But it doesnt support DX12 or Vulkan, so the GPU performance is near useless for gaming, as very very few games run natively on Mac.

Modern GPU features such as lacking AV1 encoding at the tail end of 2023

Even Intel's cheapest CPUs have IGPs that support 3 external monitors at 4k, you just need to make sure it has the ports to do it (like 1x thunderbolt 4 + 1x HDMI or Display port).

Like you can get <$500 PC laptops that do 3 external displays. Apple has no excuse beyond segmentation, forcing people to buy a more expensive 'Pro' CPU.

Only Apple has the courage to sell you a "Pro" laptop for $1600 that doesn't support more than one external display!

They do it to „upsell“ you towards M3 Pro. There is no other reason why a powerful chip like M3 should not support 2, 3 or even 4 external displays.

That’s not how this works. The vast majority of people upgrading computers have laptops that are generations behind. The only people who upgrade laptops yearly are people who are fucking insanely crazy/tech reviewers. Every year a new set of people are in need for an upgraded computer along with people just getting into the Apple ecosystem.

Look at what happened with the iMac. They waited 900 days and people were up in arms.

There are a lot of companies that don't need to push something new every 3-18 months, but investors ultimately call the shots and demand shiny new things that can be marketed as the bleeding edge and sold at exorbitant prices lest they sell their shares and invest it elsewhere. This is because if you're not using your capital to create more capital, your competitors are and will outcompete you, incentivizing heavy pushes for ever-growing profit margins, stock buybacks, dividends, etc even at the expense of the products or companies involved.

Realistically an M1 will serve you perfectly well for upwards of 10 years so long as software continues to support the ARM architecture it runs on, but if Tim Cook stood on a stage and went "Look, we really tried, but the M1 is just too good and we can't iterate on it. Just keep buying those M1 Airs until we come up with another generational leap," he'd be dragged offstage and replaced with some MBA promising infinite growth to the investors before he finished the second sentence.

They should just always make the best laptop they can. Then whenever you go to buy one, it’ll be the best they can make. Why artificially wait. They can give say 10-15% a year or 50% every 3 years. It’s actually the same except for it levels out demand and means you can buy whenever and know you’re getting something good

you DO NOT NEED TO UPDATE EVERY YEAR.

No one does. That's a myth.