Apple MacBook Pro 14- and 16-inch review: incredible performance with very long battery life and beautiful displays but expensive with absurd RAM pricing
Apple's new pro laptops right the wrongs of the past half decade — Let's start simply: the new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips …
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands one year into Apple's Apple-silicon laptop arc. The 2020 first M1 MacBook Pro proved the performance and battery case but shipped with a 16GB RAM ceiling, two USB-C ports, and a weak webcam — the 'wrongs of the past half decade' this machine sets out to undo.
With M1 Pro and M1 Max, Apple restores what pros lost, yet the review's sharpest criticism is financial rather than technical: RAM upgrade pricing. That complaint is not a one-off — it recurs through the M2 Max generation's limited upgradability and again when the 2023 M3 Pro ships with 8GB of RAM and the M3 Max model draws fire for pricey RAM and SSD upgrades, making configuration economics the consistent fault line across the whole product line.
First-order effects
- Pro buyers get immediate hardware redress — more ports, long battery life, and capable displays — so the decision to switch back or stay on Mac now hinges mostly on how much memory they configure at checkout.
- Apple converts the goodwill from fixing the hardware into margin at the configurator, where RAM and SSD steps are priced at what the reviewer calls absurd levels.
Second-order effects
- Because the criticism repeats verbatim across the M1, M2, and M3 generations without Apple changing its pricing, the company is effectively testing how much upgrade-price backlash it can absorb before it affects sales — and so far the answer appears to be: quite a lot.
- Reviewers' framing shifts over time from 'is this laptop good' to 'is the base config honest', pushing future comparisons toward total configured price rather than sticker price.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, unified memory turns RAM from a spec-parity battleground into Apple's primary upsell lever: entry configurations anchor the headline price while the real pro configurations carry the margin.
- Sustained reviewer pressure on base memory — culminating in the 8GB M3 Pro criticism — points toward base-config specs becoming a reputational issue Apple must eventually address, either by raising floors or by accepting the criticism as a cost of its pricing strategy.
The trend: Apple silicon lets the MacBook Pro iterate hardware fixes faster than any rival can respond, while Apple holds memory and storage upgrade pricing steady enough that configuration economics, not raw performance, becomes the recurring axis of review criticism.