Month: November 2023

(credit: Apple)

Apple has been dealt a blow in its €14.3 billion tax dispute with Brussels after an adviser to the EU’s top court said an earlier ruling over its business in Ireland should be shelved.

Giovanni Pitruzzella, advocate-general of the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, said on Thursday that a landmark decision quashing the EU’s order for Apple to pay €14.3 billion in back taxes to Ireland “should be set aside.”

Such opinions by advocates-general are non-binding but often influential in final judgments by the EU’s top court.

Enlarge / The Nismo version of the Nissan Z has a raft of mechanical changes, but the first thing you notice is a less-objectionable front fascia. (credit: Bradley Iger)

In the world of high-performance Nissan cars, the Nismo badge carries weight. Like BMW M and Toyota's Gazoo Racing arm, it oversees Nissan's motorsports efforts and serves as its in-house tuning department for the automaker's most performance-focused road car offerings. Founded in 1984, the skunkworks division has a reputation for building formidable track weapons like the GT-R Nismo, which set a lap record for volume production road cars at the famed Nürburgring back in 2013.

While the department has been relatively quiet lately (likely due to the limited number of enthusiast models that have graced Nissan's line-up in recent years), we knew it was only a matter of time before we'd see its handiwork applied to the new Z.

As we noted in our first drive of the standard Z last year, the seventh-generation machine ushered in a much-needed overhaul of Nissan's rear-drive sports car that addressed many of its predecessor's shortcomings, but a few laps of Las Vegas Motor Speedway's road course revealed that there was still room for improvement in terms of outright performance prowess.

Enlarge / A 14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's M3 Pro inside. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Apple announced the first three chips in its M3 processor family, the M3 Pro immediately stood out. Not because it was a huge leap over the prior generation, but because it was the first time we had seen Apple reduce key specs like transistor count, CPU and GPU core count, and memory bandwidth from one generation to the next.

Transistor count is an imperfect proxy for performance, but adding transistors is one of the primary ways to improve a chip's performance (ramping clock speeds up is another, which we'll revisit shortly). Both the M3 and M3 Max feature substantial transistor count boosts compared to their M2 counterparts—from 20 billion to 25 billion for the M3, and from 67 billion to 92 billion with the M3 Max. The M3 Pro has 37 billion, down from 40 billion in the M2 Pro.

That didn't tell us much by itself, but it did set us up to expect an M3 Pro that was a modest-at-best improvement over the M2 Pro. Now that we've been able to test one in a 14-inch MacBook Pro, we can confirm that this is the case. The M3 Pro is still decidedly faster than the regular M3, and building a chip with fewer transistors on a newer 3 nm manufacturing process has other benefits. But there's a wider performance gap between the M3 Pro and M3 Max than there was in the M2 generation, and you'll need to wait for the M4 generation before you see substantially faster Pro chips.