This year, we are looking forward to new Macs like the 15-inch MacBook Air and the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. But a new iMac hasn’t been talked about much. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has now told us what to expect from the next iMac, including the chip, size, colors, and a possible release date. This morning, Mark’s Power On newsletter talked about the iMac and other things.
When Apple released the new iMac in 2021, it improved the all-in-one design by adding a variety of dual-color options and a larger 24-inch screen that was even thinner than before at 11.5mm or 0.45 inches. Even though there are things we’d like to see, like a height-adjustable stand and a smaller chin, we don’t think the design will change much, unless there are new color options.
The 24-inch iMac has a 4.5K Retina display with 500 nits of brightness, an anti-reflective coating, and True Tone. Even though the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros have better screens thanks to miniLED and ProMotion technology, we don’t think the second-generation iMac’s display will change much. We’d love to see ProMotion on the iMac, but since it’s a high-end feature, we’ll probably have to wait for the larger iMac or iMac Pro, if it ever comes to be.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini models that came out in November 2020 were the first ones to use an Arm-based M1 chip. The M1 Chipset has been made to give amazing performance and efficiency for flagships. Also, the company released the M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets in October 2021.
Gurman has repeatedly said that Apple’s M3 chip will be in the next generation of the 24-inch iMac. There are rumors that the new chips will be made using a new 3nm process that will make them faster and use less power. This should make them better than the M2. By skipping a generation, the next iMac will be much better than the current one.
The basic iMac has two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the side. The higher-end models have two more USB 3 ports. On the higher-end models, the power adapter has a built-in Gigabit Ethernet jack, which costs an extra $30 on the basic model. Since the frame is so thin, it’s unlikely that it will have HDMI or an SDXC card slot like the MacBook Pros and Mac Studio.
Mark says that the next iMac will only come in a 24-inch size, just like Apple only worked on a 24-inch version of the new iMac last year. As for colors, the next-generation iMac is being tested with the same silver, blue, pink, and orange options as the M1 iMac. The report doesn’t say anything about yellow, green, or purple, but those colors could also be back.
But when Apple added the M2 Pro and M2 Max processors to the MacBook Pro and Mac mini in January 2023, it also raised the prices of the current iMacs in countries other than the U.S. For instance, each model of iMac in the U.K. now costs £150 more. Since Apple has changed prices to reflect changes in the exchange rate, we don’t think prices will go up again. Apple changed the price of its iMacs in 2021, and the base model now costs $1,299. We think that the price of the next model will stay the same, unless it gets a big update like the MacBook Air.
In the summer of 2022, Apple put the M2 chip in the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, so it makes sense that it will soon put an M2 chip in the iMac. The latest rumors, though, say that won’t happen. Instead, Apple might skip the M2 chip and go right to the M3 in late 2023. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg said in a January 2023 newsletter that the new M3-powered Macs will come out at the end of this year or at the start of the next.