Apple seems to be focusing on efficiency more than anything, and maybe a little more market segmentation where the lesser chips are less competitive with the bigger chips. The Pro offers fewer performance cores, trading them for efficiency cores. It has reduced memory bandwidth.

From a generational perspective, the M3 Max is offering the same level of performance as the M2 Ultra. That's amazing as the m3 max is 12p/4e vs 16p/8e in the m2 Ultra. The M3 Ultra should be a substantial lift.