Apple finally revisits the 24-inch iMac with a powerful M3 upgrade pros will love
The desktop machine receives a huge bump in power with this much-needed revisit.
One of the more popular desktop computers kicking around, the iMac sits on many desks. But Apple hasn’t touched the machine since its colourful M1 revival in 2021. But fear not, at today’s surprise Scary Fast event, Apple showed off a new all-powerful iMac that pros will love. It packs the fresh M3 chipset for uber-fast performance, and looks just as good as ever.
M3 is the first chipset in the industry made using 3nm technologies, just like the iPhone 15‘s chip. It lets Apple cram even more into the processor. The biggest change is the GPU, bringing the biggest upgrade to Apple silicon. Dynamic caching lets the GPU use local memory so only the exact amount that’s needed for each task gets used – bumping performance significantly.
It lets hardware accelerated mesh shading deliver more complicated scenes, and hardware accelerated ray tracing to Mac for the first time. It lets games render more realistic shadows. This combo lets pro apps deliver up to 2.5x fast rendering than the M1 chips. The CPUs are around 15% faster than M2, and around 30% faster than M1. The standard M3 offers an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
And the 24-inch iMac is now available with the new M3 chip, making the all-in-one even more powerful. It’s 2x faster than the M1 iMac, 4x faster than the 21.5-inch iMac, and 2.5x faster than the 27-inch iMac. On the new machine, you get Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, up to 24GB of unified memory, up to 2TB of storage, six on-board speakers, a 1080p webcam, and Touch ID via the colour-matched Magic Keyboard.
Of course, the new iMac also ships with macOS Sonoma, bringing you the latest software. It’s available to pre-order from today, with devices shipping out next week. Pricing starts at $1299/£1399, just like the previous version.
Connor Jewiss