As the last week drew to a close, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak had said, “We have an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning.” On cue is the first refresh for the Mac computing device line-up, with the iMac ushering in the M4 chip era for the portfolio. More refreshes are expected to be announced through the next few days. Considering this iMac 24-inch is identified by its colours, there are still seven albeit slightly refined colours to choose from — green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and silver. “With the Neural Engine in M4, iMac is the world’s best all-in-one for AI,” the Apple pitch says.
The tech giant’s pitch for the refreshed iMac is simple, it is “built for Apple Intelligence”, a tribute to the M4 chip’s more powerful Neural Engine, as much as 3 times more capable than an NE on the iMac with an M1 chip. That is, an M1’s 16-core Neural Engine could compute 11-trillion operations per second, or TOPS. The M4’s Neural Engine can deliver 38 TOPS. The previous generation M3, which this iMac got last year, rated at 18 TOPS. It is, a significant step forward for on-board artificial intelligence (AI) experiences, something Apple calls Apple Intelligence.
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HT had earlier detailed that core to Apple Intelligence are multiple models that they’ve built in-house, on-device processing, a smarter Siri, privacy focused Private Cloud Compute for server-side processing, updates for App Intents framework that’ll allow third-party apps to plug into the intelligence features and an optional OpenAI ChatGPT-4o integration. Private Cloud Compute is to be used when an iPhone, iPad or Mac cannot complete certain tasks on-device. These servers run the same kind of Apple Silicon hardware as the devices that users have to verify data privacy.
Rival chipmaker Intel, now a closed chapter for Apple having completed the switch to Apple Silicon for the entirety of the Mac portfolio a few years ago and with great results, continues to be in a comparison crossfire. Apple points out that the iMac 24-inch with M4 is 4.5 times faster than “the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor”, and that also when “compared to the most popular Intel-based iMac model, the new iMac is up to 6x faster.”
For the former, Apple compared the 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU iteration of the M4 paired with 16GB of RAM, with a 24-inch all-in-one (AIO) PC powered by a production spec Intel Core i7 chip with Intel Graphics, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and Windows 11 Home. Intel, and indeed chipmaker AMD’s latest AI PC optimised chips, have a neural processing unit or NPU, for most on-device AI processing.
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“With the incredible features of Apple Intelligence and the powerful performance of Apple silicon, the new iMac changes the game once again,” says John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, in a statement. The refreshed iMac will have 16GB RAM and 24GB RAM as the base specs, up from 8GB RAM baseline earlier — this can further be boosted to 32GB, for certain storage combinations. Alongside, changes include a new 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View, the choice of two or four Thunderbolt 4 ports and a new nano-texture glass coating option for those who’d want to further reduce reflections and glare (this optional add-on costs ₹20,000 and can be configured at the time of order).
Prices for the iMac with M4 start at ₹1,34,900 for the two-port spec, and ₹1,54,900 for the four port array. Only the base spec misses out on Gigabit ethernet. For generational comparisons, Apple’s pegging the M4 in the new iMac, with the M1 in the colourful iMac’s predecessor. They say productivity tasks such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets deliver up to 1.7 times quicker performance, whereas Safari browsing between the two generations is up to 1.5 times faster. They say gaming too sees a significant improvement with the latest generation silicon, with up to 2 times higher frame rates while gaming.
Video and photo editing apps including Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro will be as much as 2.1 times faster comparatively.
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The arrival of the M4 chip on the Mac portfolio, as well as Apple Intelligence, also means the latest version of macOS Sequoia is also available for all compatible Mac and MacBook machines, with the complete Apple Intelligence suite on board. The M4 chip was, in a rather unexpected turn of events in September, was introduced by the refreshed iPad Pro line-up — the first time ever an M-series generation has been led by the iPad Pros, and not the Mac.
At this time, Apple Intelligence includes system-wide Writing Tools with which users can tweak whatever they have written irrespective of the app (Writing Tools can be invoked anywhere where the keyboard is available) including rewriting, proofreading, and summarising text. The redesigned Siri goes Live too. There will also be an Eraser option for photo editing. Apple is also confirming that in December, the next chapter of Apple Intelligence will be accessible. That’ll include a more versatile (and hopefully more capable) Siri, Image Playground which is essentially a generative AI tool for creating images, Genmoji to create custom emoji as well as the integration of OpenAI’s GPT models within Writing Tools.
Could there still be a case for a screen size larger than the iMac’s present 24-inch 4.5K real estate? Perhaps. We do not know, what the rest of the week holds, for Mac refreshes.