Apple has equipped the long-awaited 24-inch iMac 2nd generation with an M3 chip and that is mainly it. Anyone who had hoped for a lot of innovation will be disappointed, the update is very limited.
The previous generation iMac was released in the spring of 2021 and featured a brand new design and the first generation of Apple Silicon. The design for the new iMac is the same as the previous model, even the colors and accessories with lightning. We list the differences between the 24-inch iMac with M1 and M3 chip for you.
New in the 24-inch iMac with M3 chip
- M3 chip (3-nanometer chip) with 8-core CPU
- up to 10-core GPU (standard 8 GPU)
- up to 24 GB memory (standard 8 GB)
- Ray tracing with hardware acceleration
- 100 GB/s memory bandwidth
- ProRes encoding and decoding engine
- Support for high impedance headphones
- WiFi 6E (802.11ax)
- Bluetooth 5.3
We had hoped that the list of innovations would be longer, but unfortunately there is no more. Most of the changes can be found in the M3 chip. In addition, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 have been added.
Unchanged design
The 24-inch iMac retains exactly the same design as the first generation from 2021, including the color combinations. It is available in green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and silver. The iMac comes with a keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad in matching colors.
The iMac has a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display with 11.3 million pixels, wide color reproduction (P3), more than a billion colors and a brightness of 500 nits. A 1080p FaceTime camera and studio-quality microphones let you make high-quality video calls on your iMac. Thanks to a six-speaker system and spatial audio support when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos, you can enjoy cinema-quality audio.
iMac with M3 processor
The 24-inch iMac 2nd generation is equipped with an M3 chip as standard. Just like its predecessor, it has an 8-core CPU, but an improved GPU from the standard 8 GPU (was 7 GPU).
- 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- up to 10-core GPU
- up to 24 GB memory (standard 8 GB)
- 16-core Neural Engine
- Ray tracing with hardware acceleration
- 100 GB/s memory bandwidth
- Media engine: H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW with hardware acceleration
- ProRes encoding and decoding engine
- choice of up to 2 TB of storage
The GPU in particular is faster, more efficient and uses the new Dynamic Caching technology. In addition, thanks to this GPU, new features such as ray tracing and mesh shading with hardware acceleration are possible for rendering on Mac for the first time.
The rendering speed is now up to 2.5 times faster than with the M1 chips. The CPU’s performance cores and efficiency cores are 30 percent and 50 percent faster than those of M1, respectively. The Neural Engine is also 60 percent faster than that of the M1 line. Finally, there is a new media engine that supports AV1 decoding, so that images from streaming services are displayed more efficiently and in higher quality.
Please note, this test was conducted by Apple using preproduction 24-inch iMac with Apple M3, 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24 GB RAM and 2 TB SSD, and production units of the 24-inch iMac with Apple M1, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB RAM and a 2 TB SSD. This is already a difference and not a one-to-one translation between performance of equivalent configurations.
Conclusion: differences between 24-inch iMac M1 and M3
If you own a 24-inch iMac with M1 chip, the new M3 iMac will be disappointing. There is no improvement in terms of design, as this has remained unchanged. Accessories such as the Magic Keyboard are also still equipped with Lighting and not USB-C.
The M3 processor has made some progress compared to the M1 chip. This is especially noticeable during gaming and peak performance such as editing in Photoshop or Final Cut Pro. In daily use, the difference is less significant and the M1 chip is sufficient.
The switch to an M3 iMac is more interesting if you still have an Intel Mac or you are less satisfied with the configurations of your current Mac.