The New iMac Is Finally Real: Preorders Open Today
Apple opened preorders for the redesigned 24-inch M1 iMac, the first fanless, color-matched iMac since 2012, starting at $1,299.
Ten days after Tim Cook held one up in seven different colors, you can actually go buy the thing. Apple opened preorders today for the redesigned 24-inch iMac, and shipments start hitting doorsteps in the second half of May.
I’ve been waiting for this moment since the Spring Loaded event, mostly because I wasn’t sure Apple would pull off what it demoed. A fanless all-in-one desktop, in colors that actually look good instead of “iPhone in a case you forgot to take off,” starting at $1,299 for the 7-core GPU base model and $1,499 if you want the full 8-core GPU config with more ports. That’s not cheap for a 24-inch machine, but it’s the first meaningful redesign of the iMac’s industrial design since 2012 — nine years of the same silver slab, gone in one keynote.
What actually matters here isn’t the color, though the color is doing a lot of the marketing work. It’s that this is the first desktop Mac built entirely around the M1 chip, and the M1 has already proven itself in laptops that get better battery life than machines running Intel’s most efficient mobile chips. Strip away the battery constraint entirely and put that chip in a fanless desktop enclosure, and you get a machine that should be dead silent under basically any everyday workload — browsing, office work, video calls, even light photo editing. Whether it holds up under sustained heavier loads without active cooling is the open question nobody outside Apple has been able to answer yet, since none of the review units are in hands.
A few practical notes for anyone eyeing the order button today: the base $1,299 config only gets two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, no Ethernet built in, and 8GB of RAM as the default — bump any of those and the price climbs quickly. The higher-end model adds two USB 3 ports, gigabit Ethernet (or 10-gig as an option), and Touch ID baked into the keyboard, which is a genuinely nice touch that hasn’t existed on desktop Mac keyboards before. If you were already on the fence, the RAM ceiling is worth thinking about — this is still an M1 machine, so you’re capped at 16GB unified memory, same ceiling as the MacBook Air and 13-inch Pro.
The bigger story is what this signals for the rest of the Mac lineup. The iMac was the last major consumer Mac still waiting on its M1 (or Apple Silicon) transition alongside the Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro already converted. That leaves the Mac Pro, the higher-end MacBook Pros, and the iMac’s older 27-inch sibling as the remaining holdouts still running Intel chips — and given how quickly Apple moved through the rest of the lineup, it’s hard to imagine those staying on Intel silicon much longer.
If you preorder today, mark your calendar for sometime after May 21st, which is the window Apple’s given for the first shipments. I’ll believe the fanless claim once real units are running fan-heavy benchmarks in warm rooms, but on paper, this is the most interesting iMac Apple has shipped in a decade.