At its Pro and Tell event today, Apple announced the long-awaited iMac with M6 chip, promising faster performance for everyday tasks and creative work, as well as a bigger boost for on-device AI. The new model, however, still retains the same familiar slim, colourful design and 24-inch 4.5K Retina display – this is more of a refresh than a proper redesign.
The starting price, however, is less familiar. At S$2,099, the base iMac with M6 costs S$300 more than the M4 model did at launch. The wider context is hard to ignore: demand from AI data centres is putting pressure on memory and storage supplies, pushing up component costs across the industry. Apple ex-CEO Tim Cook has previously said that higher memory and storage costs are feeding into the prices of Apple products. That gives the increase some context, even if it does not make the new iMac any easier to afford.
The iMac with M6 has up to a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, with Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core. In the press release, Apple says this “delivers up to twice the graphics performance of the M4 model” (remember, Apple did not release an iMac with the M5 chip). Its Dual 16-core Neural Engine is also designed to speed up AI tasks, with Apple claiming “up to five times faster on-device AI performance than the M4 iMac”, so users can run local AI models, while Apple Intelligence features are built into macOS 27.
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