> The M2 was launched in June 2022, but the Pro and Max launched in January 2023. They're not even a year old and have already been relegated to the trash heap of silicon history. It stands to reason the M2 chips didn't sell very well, so Apple wanted to get the M3 out ASAP to reverse that trend.
That theory would make a lot more sense if the M3 was providing a big performance boost.
Instead buyers of the M3 Pro get 25% less memory bandwidth than the M2 Pro, and two of the performance cores swapped for efficiency cores. Not much to reinvigorate sales by motivating M2 Pro users to upgrade other than a higher number.