Apple Scary Fast event: 24-inch iMac launched with M3 chip

Apple Scary Fast event: Apple today hosted its ‘Scary Fast’ event wherein the company announced its next generation of Apple Silicon chips dubbed as the M3 series. In addition to announcing the new chips, the company also announced that it is super-charging its 24-inch iMac with the new M3 chip. Apple says that the new iMac with M3 is up to 2x faster than the 24-inch iMac with M1 chip, and 4x faster than the 21.5-inch iMac model with Intel chips. Beyond the core, Apple hasn’t made any significant changes to the 24-inch iMac, which means you get the same display, audio and video features as the previous-gen iMac 24-inch model.

Millions of users absolutely love iMac for its stunning design and expansive 24-inch, 4.5K Retina display that’s the perfect size to spread out with all their favorite apps and get things done. And now M3 brings even more speed to everything users do, whether multitasking, creating captivating images and videos, working on a business plan, or playing their favorite games. The new iMac with M3 is incredible for anyone, especially those who haven’t yet upgraded from Intel, providing a giant leap in performance and capabilities only possible with Apple silicon.”

24-inch iMac with M3 chip India price and availability

As far as pricing is concerned, Apple says that the iMac with 8-core GPU starts at Rs 1,34,900 in India. It comes in green, pink, blue, and silver colour variants and it features an 8-core CPU, 8GB of unified memory, 256GB SSD, two Thunderbolt ports, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Mouse.

On the other hand, the iMac with 10-core GPU starts at Rs 1,54,900 in India and it is available in green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver colour variant. This model features an 8-core CPU, 8GB of unified memory, 256GB SSD, two Thunderbolt ports, two additional USB 3 ports, Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, Magic Mouse, and Gigabit Ethernet.

Coming to availability, the M3 chip powered 24-inch iMac will be in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorised Resellers starting Tuesday, November 7.

24-inch iMac with M3 chip specifications and features

The 24-inch iMac features a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display with 11.3 million pixels, a P3 wide colour gamut, over a billion colors, and 500 nits of brightness. On the camera front, the 24-inch iMac features a 1080p FaceTime HD camera with advanced image signal processor and computational video support. And on the audio front, it gets a high‑fidelity six‑speaker system with force‑cancelling woofers, wide stereo sound, support for Spatial Audio when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos, studio-quality three-mic array with high signal-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. It runs MacOS Sonoma and it features support for Magic Keyboard with Touch ID.

The most noteworthy upgrade, however, is in terms of its processing power. As mentioned before, the new 24-inch iMac is powered by the company’s M3 chip. It features an 8-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, and support for up to 24GB of unified memory. The new iMac supports advanced features such as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which the company says provides more accurate lighting, reflections, and shadows for extremely realistic gaming experiences, and making three-dimensional design and creation even faster.

Apart from the processor, Apple has also made some upgrades to the connectivity. The M3 chip powered 24-inch iMac gets support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, which is an upgrade from the last gen model’s Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 support.