Apple refreshes the iMac with M6 chips

Jess Weatherbed is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.Apple is updating the iMac with M6 chips. The new iMac generation was introduced today, ahead of Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event that’s scheduled to take place on Wednesday, giving Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer a performance boost via the same chipset it launched with the Mac Mini in August. Prices start from $1,499, and the design otherwise appears largely unchanged.This refresh comes two years after Apple gave the iMac a colorful M4 overhaul, meaning we’re skipping the M5 series entirely on this hardware. That should make this upgrade more meaningful. The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip and includes a dual 16-core Neural Engine that can boost performance when running on-device AI tasks. According to Apple’s press release, the M6-powered iMac “delivers up to 5x faster on-device AI performance” compared to the M4 model.The M6 configurations start from a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU for $1,499, which is the same price as the 8-core CPU-equipped M4 iMac. There’s also a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU starting at $1,699. Preorders will launch at 1:10PM ET on October 28th, and it’ll be fully available starting November 6th.Besides the chip upgrade, there the new iMac isn’t getting much in the way of a hardware refresh. It now has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 on the base model instead of just the higher-spec variant, but carries over the same Thunderbolt limitations as the M4 iMac — you only get two ports on the 10-core version, and four on the 12-core upgrade.Developing…Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jess Weatherbed