I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
A single object to hand your kid for their dorm that will move every 8 months is much nicer than a bunch of parts and wires.
If your kid is lugging this machine into class, may god have mercy on their soul.
But why not just buy a Macbook at that point?
People need (!) this type of devices in representative settings, eg the reception of a boutique hotel.
I agree. In the case of the older 27" iMacs-- you couldn't really get a 5K screen of that quality for any reasonable cost. It made it actually useful.
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.<p>But they aren't <i>Apple</i>.
1. Social signalling<p>2. Aesthetic<p>3. Pretty colors<p>4. Nostalgia
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.<p>24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.<p>Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.retinarelay.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.retinarelay.com/</a>
Apple have never released a 32" version of the iMac; even the iMac Pro was only available as a 27" model.
To me, it doesn't make sense, I would go a Mac Studio with multiple screens instead a big 32, but some people love working with one monitor.
Completely agree.<p>iPad docking station too
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
The strangest thing is that with Thunderbolt 4+ you could easily do this in software only I suppose?
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).<p>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.<p>And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.<p>And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.<p>So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.<p>As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.<p>Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?<p>And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
These M7 rumors and that they're skipping the M6 Pro/Max rumors are really making me try to stretch my M1 Pro until next year.<p>I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Apple killed M6 Pro, M6 Ultra and M6 Max to focus on AI chip, so yeah that'd be a more sensible option.
Will local AI eventually pull the proverbial rug out from under the big providers and the huge sums invested in building out data centers?
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
><i>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth</i><p>I don't know man?<p>The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up <i>considerably</i>. That hardware confers a <i>material</i> change in capability.<p>Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.<p>I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.<p>The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.<p>It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.<p>If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
Interesting. I have the same machine w/ same specs. I find it sluggish. I think it depends on what you're doing.
You might want to do a full restore or something, my M1 Max isn't sluggish at all.
What are you doing with yours? I recently started using Android/iOS emulators locally and combined with anything else my M1 Pro 32 GB feels unusable.<p>Definitely grabbing 128 GB + for the next machine.
..really useful on a Mac. FTFY
I'll wait for the M7 iMac with OLED and then never buy it
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.<p>It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
>or a reception desk at a business<p>This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
Too relatable.<p>Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.<p>It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
All while complaining about the OLED price.
Wait until the ProRes version comes out before you sleep on it permanently.
it will cost a kidney + Apple would remove the keyboard and sell it back to you for 499$.
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag<p>On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
it is a piece of furniture though, so aesthetics matter
You can get it with a VESA mount instead of the base.
>meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever<p><i>"And we’re just getting started."</i><p>It is an Apple machine, yes.
It's like a 24" MacBook Pro with no keyboard and less portable?<p>If it were back to 27" and hidpi screen again it might make sense
Still 24 inch screen in 2026. You can get a 27 inch panel for far less than a stick of ram these days. Why not give us a decent sized screen!
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.<p>It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.<p><pre><code> the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
</code></pre>
And receptionists! Don't forget receptionists. :)
My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.
I’ve felt the same way since way back then ever since reading about this guy’s setup[0], so I paired a 11” MBA with the quad core Mac Mini 2012.<p>I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.<p>It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.<p>0: <a href="https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-note-about-my-new-mac-set-up/" rel="nofollow">https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-note-about-my-new-mac-set...</a>
That's interesting. (I mean that genuinely. Sometimes when people say that, they mean "You seem crazy")<p>What's the appeal there? Doing big-RAM-requirement stuff that just won't run on a laptop?
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.<p>Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.<p>So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.<p>A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.<p>24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
Because then they can't sell you their overpriced 27" screen.
Available at 1829 euros for the basic configuration, nah.
Waited for it so long but.... still no memory option for more than 32GB. It would be nice to have some kind of a pro model.
32GB max memory is ludicrous today. We've regressed as a technological society.
Did you know Moore had two not-as-famous cousins with their own laws? Sam and Leslie.<p>Sam predicted price-per-transistor-per-square-inch density would asymptote, while Leslie predicted it would level off and then regress.<p>Leslie's Law is in full effect, it seems.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
the laptop has up to 128G as an option, but also pushes towards 10k for a laptop, insane
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.<p>This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
Why can't we buy the colored magic keyboard as standalone product?<p>I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.<p>£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
> £700/£800 buys you a 24" display<p>That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
I wish they would put these colors on laptops.
For me it's the other way round. I wish they would offer a space-gray or black option like they have on their laptops<p>Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
they put some on macbook neos ... But one thing for sure, Apple reserve those flashy colors for entry levels models (Ipad 10/11th gen, Macbook Neo).
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).<p>0: <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+and+2374+Teardown/1236" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...</a><p>1: <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Apple’s+Most+Replaceable+Battery-/172727" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...</a>
The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.
There were serious thermal issues with the late 00's 24" iMacs. I had one that ate 3 hard drives, and then the display in about 6 years.
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
Makes the angle very easy to adjust.<p>I used to put post-its on mine too.
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
They are _still_ featuring magic mouse on the promo photos for the iMac<p><a href="https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb%E2%80%91c-white-multi-touch-surface" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...</a>
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
It's still the standard Apple mouse, no? Why wouldn't they include it in the promo photos?
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.<p>It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
Looks like they it still comes with a "magic mouse", of course the only thing "magic" about it is having a worse sensor than a $5 Logitech.
24” and 60hz…
It’s intentional product segmentation. Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary.
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary<p>The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Perfect for the target audience!
My wife used to mock me for being adamant about 120hz+ monitors, until the day I had her try my 200hz monitor for an entire day.<p>Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.
Waiting for 512 GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra still. I guess they are rolling things out now, it has been expected for late October.
24" and not 27" monitor?<p>Would have bought one otherwise.
I love these things. Never going to buy one. But I love what they are doing with them.
The problem with getting a new Mac is then you're stuck with macOS 27 with Liquid Glass.
27 is fine, fixed a lot of the issues in 26.
macOS 27 is pretty good. They walked back a lot of the poor changes from 26
I want one and I don't know what I'd do with it
The title text animation is really cute, props to whoever made this!
Do people still actually buy iMacs?
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.<p>Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)<p>We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, <i>and</i> it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.