Apple’s M3 iMac is up for preorder, starting at $1,299

Folks banking on the arrival of the iMac Pro will have to wait a bit longer. If you’ve been looking to upgrade your 24-inch all-in-one, on the other hand, Apple’s got some good news. The company just unveiled a refresh to the 24-inch iMac that skips the M2 altogether, in favor of the M3 chip that was announced alongside it at this evening’s Scary Fast event.

You can read more about what the next generation of Apple silicon brings to the table over here. The top-level stuff are improvements to the GPU, as the company attempts to position itself as a gaming contender. Specifically of note are the arrival of hardware-based ray tracing and mesh shading, which bring big improvements to the system’s rendering capabilities.

The chip features an 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU and 16-core neural engine and support for up to 24GB of memory. Apple says the system is capable of up to 2x the M1’s performance (not the M2, mind). The newly announced M3 Pro and M3 Max will, however, not be appearing on the refreshed all-in-one. Gotta save some of that firepower for the Mac Studio and (one imagines) the iMac Pro.

Sayeth Apple:

When compared to the previous-generation 24-inch iMac, creatives can:

• Edit and play back up to 12 streams of 4K video, which is 3x more than before.
• Produce video projects in Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro up to 2x faster.
• Process photos in apps like Adobe Photoshop up to 2x faster.

The centerpiece of the new iMac is, naturally, the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, which is intended to effectively split the difference between the 4k and 5k Intel iMacs. The 4.5K model weighs on at 11.3 million pixels and 500 nits of brightness. That’s coupled with a 1080p FaceTime camera and a six-speaker system with support for both Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos.

The new iMac supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. There are four USB-C ports (two of which support Thunderbolt) and Gigabit Ethernet support (select models). It ships in green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue or silver, with a matching keyboard and either a trackpad or mouse. There’s also optional TouchID for the keyboard.

The new M3 iMac starts at $1,299 for the 8-core GPU and 8-core CPU. Another $200 will get you an 8-core GP, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. You can preorder it starting to tonight, and it will start shipping next week.