Apple Reveals the New 2024 iMac: Familiar on the Outside, but With New Power Inside

We weren’t totally thrilled with Apple’s 2023 iMac refresh that came stock with the company’s newfangled M3 silicon. Still, the Cupertino, California tech giant is ready to get into the ring again with a similar-looking, though more powerful, 24-inch iMac, this time with the M4 chip housed inside. Beyond that, all the Apple Magic accessories are getting an upgrade. Before you get too excited, the only change is the switch from Lightning to USB-C.

If you stack the two all-in-one computers side by side, you’d be hard-pressed to spot the difference. However, the major improvement this time is the switch to M4. That chip made its debut with the iPad Pro earlier this year. It’s a more powerful processor than last year’s M3, though it won’t be as much of a dramatic jump as moving from the M1 or M2 chips to the M4. The M4 has a much better neural engine than the previous version of Apple silicon, plus the expanding ray-tracing capabilities born by the M3.

Apple claims the new $1,300 iMac with the new chip is around 1.7 times faster than the iMac with the M1 chip in CPU performance and more than two times better in GPU performance. However, the base model only nets you the 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU. As for gaming, you may be limited by a lack of options for an M4 Pro chip, even though you can grab the 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU version for $1,500.

© Image: Apple

The new iMac does not offer an M4 Pro option, though several configurations with more GPU cores and SSD storage are available. Like the 2023, Apple’s latest all-in-one computer sports a 4.5K Retina LCD. The 2023 version offered options ranging from 256 GB of SSD memory and 8 GB of RAM to 2 TB of storage and 24 GB of unified memory. There’s good news on this front, at least. This new version of Apple’s all-in-one comes with 16 GB of RAM across the first three models. There’s a version with 24 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage for $1,900. You can go up to 32 GB of RAM for an extra $200 and a 2 TB SSD for an additional $600.

Last year’s iMac sported a wide range of pleasingly subdued colors, including a violet purple and a late autumn orange. The new version sports the same selection of blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and silver. Despite users having the option to taste the rainbow, you may want to spend more money on the step up from the base $1,300 model. The lower-end iMac only has two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports while the ones starting at $1,500 come with four. The more expensive iMacs also have an ethernet port, where the cheaper one doesn’t.

Just like last year, the iMac’s peripherals are meant to match your color selection. The all-new Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad are essentially the same product as before, but now they come with USB-C. That means you can charge them through one of the four USB-C ports on the rear of the new iMac with any spare cable you have lying around.

Apple is releasing new Mac products this week in anticipation of its big blowout AI features dropping piecemeal over the next few months and into 2025. Apple launched macOS 15.1 on Monday, sporting the all-new Writing Tools, which uses AI to proofread, summarize, or rewrite text. The next step in its expanding AI-ified OS is ChatGPT, which is directly integrated with Siri and AI image generation with Image Playground.

The new iMac starts at $1,300 and is available for preorder beginning Monday. It will ship on Nov. 8.

Apple said it plans to pull the sheet off even more Mac products this week, so keep your eye out for even more new desktops and laptops.