First customers get their new M3 MacBook Pro and iMac deliveries

The first lucky customers around the world have received their new M3 MacBook Pro and iMac machines, thanks to the joys of timezones.

Apple works on local time when it comes to shipping new devices, so those in Australia and New Zealand become eligible for deliveries first, and the US having to wait a little while longer …

Reviewers were the first to get their hands on the new machines, of course, under Apple embargo – meaning they can only publish at a date and time determined by the Cupertino company.

Those reviews landed yesterday, with Arstechnica noting that the M3 Max version of the MacBook Pro is very close to that of the best desktop PCs.

The M3 Max’s can get pretty close to the single- and multi-core performance of high-end desktop PC chips like the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Intel Core i9-14900K, which is seriously impressive given that the M3 Max can fit into a laptop, and those are both top-tier consumer desktop chips that are drawing huge amounts of power and generating large amounts of heat. Generally, the M3 Max is closer in lighter tests like Geekbench, but it falls behind a bit in heavier tests like Cinebench or our Handbrake video encoding test, where the desktops’ effectively unlimited thermal headroom let them run faster for longer.

Now paying customers are starting to share photos of their own models as their deliveries arrive.

Other have been checking out the new machines in Apple stores.

Do share links to your own photos in the comments if you’re taking delivery of a shiny new M3-powered Mac today.