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Home / Hot Stuff / Apple finally revisits the 24-inch iMac with a powerful M3 upgrade pros will love

Apple finally revisits the 24-inch iMac with a powerful M3 upgrade pros will love

The desktop machine receives a huge bump in power with this much-needed revisit.

24-inch iMac with M3

One of the more popular desktop computers kicking around, the iMac sits on many desks. But Apple hasn’t touched the machine since its colourful M1 revival in 2021. But fear not, at today’s surprise Scary Fast event, Apple showed off a new all-powerful iMac that pros will love. It packs the fresh M3 chipset for uber-fast performance, and looks just as good as ever.

M3 is the first chipset in the industry made using 3nm technologies, just like the iPhone 15‘s chip. It lets Apple cram even more into the processor. The biggest change is the GPU, bringing the biggest upgrade to Apple silicon. Dynamic caching lets the GPU use local memory so only the exact amount that’s needed for each task gets used – bumping performance significantly.

M3 chipset family

It lets hardware accelerated mesh shading deliver more complicated scenes, and hardware accelerated ray tracing to Mac for the first time. It lets games render more realistic shadows. This combo lets pro apps deliver up to 2.5x fast rendering than the M1 chips. The CPUs are around 15% faster than M2, and around 30% faster than M1. The standard M3 offers an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU.

And the 24-inch iMac is now available with the new M3 chip, making the all-in-one even more powerful. It’s 2x faster than the M1 iMac, 4x faster than the 21.5-inch iMac, and 2.5x faster than the 27-inch iMac. On the new machine, you get Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, up to 24GB of unified memory, up to 2TB of storage, six on-board speakers, a 1080p webcam, and Touch ID via the colour-matched Magic Keyboard.

M3 iMac in red on desk

Of course, the new iMac also ships with macOS Sonoma, bringing you the latest software. It’s available to pre-order from today, with devices shipping out next week. Pricing starts at $1299/£1399, just like the previous version.

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About

Connor is a writer for Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. He has been writing for around seven years now, with writing across the web and in print too. Connor has experience on most major platforms, though does hold a place in his heart for macOS, iOS/iPadOS, electric vehicles, and smartphone tech. Just like everyone else around here, he’s a fan of gadgets of all sorts! Aside from writing, Connor is involved in the startup scene. This exciting involvement puts him at the front of new and exciting tech, always on the lookout for innovating products.

Areas of expertise

Mobile, macOS, EVs, smart home