Apple just gave the iMac a “chip and ship” upgrade, adding a faster M6 processor to the standalone desktop computer. The new iMac looks just like its M4 predecessor — and, surprisingly, so does its price tag.
“iMac is the world’s best all-in-one, and today it raises the bar yet again,” said Shelly Goldberg, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering, in a press release Tuesday.
Faster chip, faster SSD, faster connectivity
At a time when steep price hikes are becoming the norm, Apple’s latest iMac upgrade stands out. The new M6 iMac keeps the colorful all-in-one design of its predecessor but delivers a substantial performance boost, faster storage and modern connectivity, including Wi-Fi 7 — all without raising the $1,499 starting price.
That’s good news for anyone shopping for a new desktop, especially as Apple pushes harder into on-device AI and graphics-intensive tasks.
The main highlight of the new iMac is the M6 chip. It brings a major leap in performance over its M4 sibling, which Apple released in 2024. As a result, Apple makes some bold performance claims for the M6 iMac.
“From families and aspiring creators to small businesses, users will experience the speed and power of M6 in everything they do,” Apple’s press release said. “Featuring a faster CPU and GPU with Neural Accelerators in each core, it blazes through everyday apps and multitasking while delivering powerful performance for creative workflows like photo and video editing.”
Over the M1, the refreshed model delivers up to 2.5x faster performance in apps like Microsoft Excel, up to 3.3x faster graphics performance in Affinity photo editing and up to 12x faster on-device AI performance for prompt processing in LM Studio.
Even over the M4 model, the M6 chip delivers up to 2x higher gaming performance with ray tracing and up to 2x faster graphics performance.
The faster SoC is not the only upgrade. Thanks to the N1 chip, the new iMac supports WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Even Ethernet connectivity is getting an upgrade and now supports transfer speeds of up to 2.5 GbE. The SSD is faster, too, delivering up to 2x faster read and write performance.
As before, Apple will bundle a color-matched keyboard and mouse or trackpad with the M6 iMac.
Pricing and availability
The M6 iMac goes up for preorder Wednesday in 35 countries, including the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. Unlike the OLED iPad mini, which Apple unveiled Monday, the new iMac does not bring a price hike, with the starting MSRP remaining unchanged at $1,499.
Note that the entry-level model ships with a binned version of the M6 chip featuring a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU. The $1,699 model gets the 12-core chip.
Preorder: Apple
Also Tuesday, Apple pulled a similar trick with the M6 MacBook Pro. The latest laptop is also a chip-and-ship upgrade, with Apple dropping the M6 into the same chassis as last year’s M5 model without ballooning the price tag.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
