Headphones

Expectation and placebo, or your amp was manufactured wrong. Or your ears are magical who knows.

you have to be careful doing comparisons because it's actually pretty difficult to volume match and we basically can only recall the general tone/pitch of an audio sample and even then it's only in any sort of detail for like 12 seconds.

it's unlikely it sounds worse or better but the magni 3 can absolutely handle almost any eq you can dream of on the audezae while the macbook cannot.

Yeah I had a somewhat similar experience in that my Scarlett 2i2 sounded no different to a topping DX3 pro+ which I bought and swiftly returned

Any of the MacBooks released in 2021 onwards have a high impedance 3.5mm output. Joshua Valour tested the LCD X at around the 6 minute mark of the linked video and said it was impressive even compared to his Fiio rig.

Do you know why schitt call it the heresy?

Macs have great internal DACs.

The issue might be poor contact of you cables.

Cough cough. You don't need a dac any more and only need an amp if your headphones are harder to drive. Cough* internal DACs have become much better in the last 3 decades* cough.