Apple’s new and powerful ARM-based chip, the M1, is slowly making it to a variety of its product lineups. We first saw the in-house 5nm chip on the new MacBooks and now the Cupertino giant has announced it for its new iPads as well as iMacs.
The company’s colorful new iMacs are based on the M1 chipset with 8 CPU cores and 7/8 GPU cores, 7 new color options, and a number of other upgrades as well.
Apple’s all-in-one computer now has a 1080p webcam and six built-in speakers, which includes two pairs of force-canceling woofers that have support for Dolby Atmos. There are a total of three microphones with “studio quality” output and directional beamforming.
The Retina display is a 23.5-inch panel with 4.5k resolution, 500 nits of maximum brightness, 10-bit colors, and True Tone technology to adjust color temperature automatically based on your surroundings. The screen can display 11.3 million pixels and comes with an “industry-leading” anti-reflective coating.
The new Apple M1 chip brings an 85% faster CPU performance and up to 50% better GPU performance compared to previous generations. There is also 3x faster machine learning. The base models start with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, but you can go all the way to 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage for a sky-high price.
As for connectivity, you get WiFi 6 support and two Thunderbolt ports, but more expensive options will give you two additional USB C ports and a 1Gbps Ethernet port.
You can also get a Magic Keyboard with matching colors and Touch ID for your new iMacs. This makes it the world’s first wireless input with a biometric authentication system. The keyboard also comes with a security chip to enable an end-to-end encrypted channel for your fingerprint data.
The new M1-based Apple iMacs will go for sale by the end of this month with a starting price of $1499. Shipping will start by the second half of May.
