Apple Launches 24-Inch iMac With M6 Chip and Wi-Fi 7 From $1,499

Apple has announced a new 24-inch iMac powered by the M6 chip. It also adds the Apple-designed N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and SSDs with up to twice the read and write speeds. Pricing in the U.S. starts at $1,499.

The design is unchanged from the M4 model. The iMac still comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver, with a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display of up to 500 nits and a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with Desk View. All models keep six speakers, three microphones, a 3.5mm headphone jack and support for Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

What the M6 changes

The M6 debuted in the Mac mini in August. It is the first chip with a dual Neural Engine, two 16-core engines instead of one, and it puts Neural Accelerators in every GPU core for the first time. Memory bandwidth rises to up to 170GB/s from 120GB/s on the M4.

Apple says the new iMac is up to 2× faster in graphics and up to 5× faster in on-device AI than the M4 model. It also claims up to 12× the speed of the M1 iMac and up to 18× that of the last Intel-based iMac. Earlier Geekbench results for the M6 in the Mac mini suggest roughly 40% faster CPU performance for the higher-end iMac. PCIe 5.0 support doubles SSD speeds, and the N1 chip replaces Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

Pricing and availability

The $1,499 model has a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. A $1,699 configuration moves to a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU and adds four Thunderbolt 4 ports. Storage tops out at 2TB and RAM at 32GB. The previous base model also cost $1,499 after a June increase from $1,299.

A power adapter with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet costs $30 extra on the base model and is standard on the higher-end one. The Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard with Touch ID are unchanged.

Pre-orders open Wednesday, October 28 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific Time, and the iMac goes on sale Friday, November 6.