I Chose a refurbished M3 Pro MBP rather than waiting for the M4 announcement

And I don’t regret it for a second!

I have long considered myself an early adopter of new ideas, new tech and new ways to manage my life, not to mention a risk taker. Now I’m retired, not much has changed, but without any regular income (I’m using savings rather than digging into my pension) I do have to be a little bit more thoughtful about how I acquire new tech. I’m fully aware of my profligacy in the past, when I upgraded because I could, and this year I’ve really got to grips with that issue. I did buy a new Apple Watch S10 (up from the S7), but I really didn’t see the need to upgrade from a perfectly working iPhone 15 Pro Max (although I got close to downgrading!)

But my pièce de résistance this year has been my upgrade from my 13” M1 MBP to an 14” M3 Pro MBP. Yes, that’s right and M3, not an M4! And I did it knowing that the announcement of the new M4 chips and MacBooks had already been scheduled and was less than three days away. I can hear the sound of certain readers on Medium face palming themselves in disbelief that anyone could be so stupid! So, what possessed me?

My new home office set up — spot the M3 Pro MBP (Photo from Author)

Despite being retired, I have found myself taking on more and more work. Not only has the volume increased, but I’m doing more diverse activities and need more processing power than is available on the M1. (There’s another story about why I ended up with the M1 in the first place which you can read here…https://medium.com/@allygill_73781/6-months-hands-on-with-m1-13-macbook-pro-47e412062045)

Knowing that I’d be returning to the UK in a few months, after over ten years living in Prague, I’ve spent quite a long time thinking (and overthinking) about a potential upgrade path. I set myself a budget of £2,500 (plus or minus 10%) and this needed to meet a couple of basic criteria:

• It had to support two external monitors out of the box
• It needed to have 16Gb or more of unified memory
• It needed at least 1Tb of storage (my M1 has a 2Tb SSD)
• I wanted the biggest improvement possible without going crazy

To meet the first requirement clearly meant an Mx Pro chip. It was the last two requirements that had me worried. Given the price of Apple SSDs, getting a machine with a replacement 2Tb SSD was going to take up a big part of even a £2,500 budget at around £600. I started thinking about going desktop only. I already have an M1 Mac Mini and a Studio Display Monitor, but that only has a 512Tb SSD. Even replacing that with an M2 Pro and building up the spec was getting scarily expensive. And here’s my dilemma — if I’m buying a new Mac I find it far to easy to get carried away — and before I know it, I’m in la-la land and getting closer to £4K or beyond.

Time for a constraint mechanism to come into play, and the best way to safely do that is to look at the Apple Refurbished store. I started looking there a few weeks ago and there were some really good deals starting to percolate through. The great things about the Refurbished store is are you can :

• only purchase what they have available which is a brilliant constraining mechanism
• often pick up a machine that has barely been used but was returned under the generous Apple returns policy
• be assured of a 12 month warranty period under normal Apple terms
• get Apple Care under normal Apple terms

I finally decided to buy an M3 Pro, 12-core CPU/18 Core GPU, with 18Gb/1Tb memory/storage in Space Black for £2,119. Of course, we now know that the M4 turned out to be a much better deal that anyone was expecting — most particularly because the baseline specs changed so dramatically. But, as usual, I had a limited window in which to buy the machine, get it set up and be comfortable that it would work exactly as I expected in the two weeks I was in the UK. It was a smart decision as there was no way the M4 would have shipped in that time. The greatest buyers advice I ever got for tech purchases was to buy what you need today, not what might be available in the future.

The M3 Pro is a fine machine for my needs. It has that necessary edge over the M1 with the faster processors, and the extra 2Gb of unified memory provides some extra buffer — although it has been a long time since I’ve seen the warnings that memory is under pressure. Luckily, I had spent some time moving some of my clutter off the 2Tb SSD on the M1 and offloading onto my array of SanDisk SSDs, so I only had about 0.5Tb to transfer, which meant that the data migration should have been a bit easier. But I’ll come back to that another day!

In practical terms, I am delighted with the M3 ProMBP. While the machines received significant criticism when they were released, many individuals have unrealistic expectations and budgets that are significantly higher than those of the majority of actual consumers. Most people cannot afford to undergo an upgrade cycle of 12–18 months, and most of us should not have any need to. I was particularly fond of the M1, as it was a genuinely lightweight yet reasonably heavy-duty machine that perfectly suited my requirements. While I appreciated the Touch Bar, it is worth noting that the tech vloggers who excessively praise the MacBook Air have criticised the original M1 MacBook Pro as a mere imitation of a professional machine.

Would a shiny new M4 Pro have been a better option? Quite probably. But I have no buyers remorse. I bought what I needed, for a price I could afford and with a shipping time that was perfect. If you find yourself struggling to decide the right machine for you, you can do a lot worse than have a rummage through the refurb store on the Apple website!

I am a semi-retired, independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better working methods. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, about working in the Apple ecosystem and about my adopted home in Prague, but I’m relatively new to Medium (so please be gentle with me!). I’m also the Chairman of Kegworth Heritage Centre.