Following the M6 Mac mini, Apple is giving the iMac a similar “chip and ship” upgrade. The new iMac looks the same as its M4 predecessor, but now features a faster M6 chip.
“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.
Faster chip, faster SSD, faster connectivity
The main highlight of the new iMac is the M6 chip that brings a major leap in performance over its M4 sibling. Apple makes some bold performance claims for the M6 iMac.
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 pre-order starting tomorrow, October 28, in 35 countries, including the US, India, UK and Canada. Unlike the OLED iPad mini, the new iMac is not getting any 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
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.
