Apple on October 27 announced a new 24-inch iMac built on its M6 chip, with a starting price of $1,499 in the United States - $200 more than the $1,299 that the entry iMac with M4 cost when Apple introduced it on October 28, 2024. Pre-orders open on October 28 in 35 countries and regions, including the US, and the machine reaches customers, Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers from Friday, November 6, according to Apple.

The line-up has two configurations. A model with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU costs $1,499, or $1,449 with education pricing. A model with a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU costs $1,699, or $1,599 for education. The M4 generation started lower: its 8-core model sold for $1,299 ($1,249 for education) and its 10-core model for $1,499 ($1,399 for education), according to Apple's October 28, 2024 announcement. No 8-core model appears in the October 27 release.

ELI5

Apple made a new iMac desktop computer with a faster chip called M6, and the cheapest version costs $1,499, compared with $1,299 for the cheapest iMac Apple launched in 2024. The machine runs Apple's new Siri AI assistant, including in the European Union, where iPhones still don't get it, but Apple limits how much of its cloud-based AI anyone can use each day and plans to charge for more. If you want the fingerprint-reading keyboard included, support for two extra monitors or the anti-glare screen option, you now need the $1,699 version.

Two models, a higher floor

The headline increase is $200, or 15.4% on the entry price, by PPC Land's calculation. At the top of the range the step is the same in dollars: $1,699 now, against $1,499 for the most expensive standard configuration in 2024, a rise of 13.3%. Education buyers see the floor move from $1,249 to $1,449, up 16%.

Compared by core count, the picture is different. A 10-core iMac cost $1,499 in 2024 and costs $1,499 now. What that money buys, though, has changed. Apple's specifications for the 2024 four-port iMac list a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID in the box, four Thunderbolt 4 ports, built-in Gigabit Ethernet, support for up to two external 6K displays and an optional nano-texture display. Several of those now sit only on the $1,699 model.

The footnotes to the October 27 release set out the split. The 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet option "is available on models with 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU." All four USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4 only on the 12-core models. Nano-texture glass is an option only on the 12-core models. The 12-core iMac "comes standard with Touch ID," while the 10-core version "can configure to" a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad. Apple's iMac product page adds that the 10-core model supports one external display, against up to two for the 12-core model.

That leaves the $1,499 M6 model with the same limits that defined the $1,299 M4 entry model two years ago. Apple's specification page for the 2024 two-port iMac lists one external display and a Magic Keyboard without Touch ID as standard.

Some figures are missing altogether. The release does not state how much unified memory or storage the base models carry, and the product page gives only a 32GB maximum. The 2024 models started at 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. Apple also does not say whether the 10-core M6 model offers wired Ethernet of any speed.

Leasing and financing

Apple also priced the machine through its leasing program. Apple Upgrade, a lease provided by Klarna, puts the iMac with M6 at $28.99 a month for 36 months, excluding taxes and trade-in credit, or $40.99 a month over 24 months, based on the $1,499 purchase price. Over the full terms that is $1,043.64 and $983.76 respectively, by PPC Land's calculation. Both totals are below the purchase price, and the gap reflects ownership: under Apple's terms, the lessee does not own the iMac at the end of the lease without paying the amount due to exercise a purchase option. Apple does not state that amount.

Apple Upgrade replaced the iPhone Upgrade Program in the US on July 28, 2026, when Mac leases were advertised from $24.99 a month and the M4 iMac was among the covered models. Ending a lease early can cost up to the full amount of the remaining payments, according to the terms in the iMac release. Leases are limited to US residents with a Klarna account.

Buyers paying with Apple Card can use Apple Card Monthly Installments at 0% APR and receive 3% Daily Cash up front, according to Apple. Apple Trade In credit and year-round education pricing also apply.

What M6 changes inside

The chip is the substance of the update. The CPU now has up to 12 cores, two more than before, and Apple claims "the world's fastest single-threaded CPU performance." That claim rests on Apple's own testing in October 2026 "using shipping competitive systems and select industry-standard benchmarks." The release does not name the benchmarks or the competing systems.

The GPU also gains two cores, to a maximum of 12, and each core now carries a Neural Accelerator. Apple says graphics are up to 2x faster than M4, with up to 2x higher gaming performance with ray tracing. The Neural Engine moves from the single 16-core unit listed in Apple's M4 iMac specifications to what Apple calls a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, which delivers "up to 2x faster AI compute than the previous generation."

Memory bandwidth rises to up to 170GB/s. Apple's specification pages list 120GB/s for both M4 iMac models, so the increase is about 42%, by PPC Land's calculation. Bandwidth matters for one workload Apple singles out: running LLMs on the device. When a model writes its answer word by word, speed usually depends on how fast its weights move from memory to the processor. Reading the prompt, the step Apple chose to measure, leans more on raw compute, which is where the GPU's new Neural Accelerators come in.

Connectivity moves forward a generation. The M4 iMac shipped with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, according to Apple's 2024 specifications; the M6 model has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The optional 2.5Gb Ethernet port delivers "up to 2.5x faster wired connectivity than the previous generation," which had Gigabit Ethernet. SSD read and write speeds are up to 2x faster. The ports remain Thunderbolt 4, up to four of them, and the 12-core model can drive two 6K external displays, which Apple describes as a workspace "with more than 50 million pixels."

How Apple measured its claims

The performance comparisons deserve a closer reading than the headline multiples suggest. The tests Apple details on its iMac product page for the Intel, M1 and M4 comparisons all used a preproduction iMac with the 12-core M6, 32GB of unified memory and a 2TB SSD, run by Apple in September 2026. The $1,499 model, with two fewer CPU and GPU cores, was not the test machine.

The "up to 18x faster" figure against "the most popular Intel-based iMac" comes from a single task. Apple compared super resolution on a 16MB file in Pixelmator Pro against a production 21.5-inch iMac with a 3.0GHz 6-core Intel Core i5, a Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB of memory, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. The Intel machine ran Pixelmator Pro v3.8 on macOS Sequoia 15.8; the M6 ran v4.3. Apple does not explain how it determined which Intel iMac was most popular. In October 2024, Apple put the equivalent figure for the M4 iMac at up to 6x.

The AI figures are narrower still. Apple says the iMac is up to 12x faster than iMac with M1 and up to 5x faster than iMac with M4 for "prompt processing in LM Studio." The product page specifies the method: time to first token, measured with a prompt of 8K tokens, using a 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization in LM Studio 0.4.24+1. Time to first token measures how quickly a model reads its input and begins to answer. It says nothing about how fast the rest of the answer is generated. The M4 comparison machine had a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of memory and a 2TB SSD; the M1 machine had an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 16GB.

Application claims follow the same pattern. Apple cites up to 2.5x faster performance in Microsoft Excel than iMac with M1 and up to 1.5x faster than M4, and up to 3.3x faster graphics in Affinity photo editing than M1, with up to 2x over M4.

Siri AI on a desktop the EU can buy

For European buyers, the most consequential line sits in a footnote. "Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS," Apple writes, adding that it "is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward." macOS is not on that list.

That arrangement dates to the start of the software cycle. When Apple shipped macOS 27 on September 14, Mac users in the EU gained access to Siri AI while iPhone and iPad users did not, a split tied to Apple's reading of the Digital Markets Act, under which iOS and iPadOS are designated core platform services and macOS is not. On Apple's July 30 earnings call, Tim Cook said Siri AI is available on Mac in the EU because Mac is not covered by the same regulations as iPhone and iPad.

Language is a second constraint. Apple Intelligence works with device and Siri language set to any of 16 languages, among them Danish, Dutch, German, Italian and Swedish. Siri AI is narrower: it is a beta in macOS 27.2 and works in six languages - English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - on a device set to a supported language. A German-language iMac in Berlin, in other words, does not get Siri AI unless its owner switches languages. Apple published a separate Newsroom item on October 26 headlined "Siri AI is available in more languages starting today." Siri AI is not available to users under 13.

Daily limits and a planned fee

Server-side features carry caps. According to Apple, "certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, including but not limited to Siri AI, intelligent photo editing tools, Image Playground, and AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts." The limits "may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies, and other factors." Then comes the commercial signal: "Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future."

The wording matches what Apple said in September, and, as then, there is no price, no date and no published cap. Apple's iPad mini announcement on October 26 carried the same footnote. What happens when the owner of a $1,699 desktop reaches the daily cap on its headline assistant? The release does not say.

What Siri AI does on the iMac

The release describes Siri AI as "a new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal." On the iMac it can answer questions, find material across messages, emails and photos, and take action across apps. It is built into Spotlight, "making it easy to search for answers on virtually any topic and ask follow-up questions." Visual Intelligence gets a dedicated keyboard shortcut to ask Siri about anything on screen, "from a chart in a spreadsheet to a photo in a browser tab." Siri can also write and edit "almost anywhere" text is typed and, in Mail and Messages, reflect a user's "typical style and tone."

For publishers, the Spotlight integration puts an answer engine inside the operating system's own search bar on the desktop. Apple's Applebot documentation, updated on June 8, 2026, says crawled pages may supply context when Apple's models generate output, that answers may link to sources, and that a nosnippet directive stops a page from being used as answer context. Apple said at WWDC26 that its new foundation models were custom-built with Google and its Gemini models, then adapted to run on device and on Private Cloud Compute.

Safari, the browser that watches prices

Apple Intelligence also reaches into Safari, and here the iMac release touches retail marketing directly. Safari now "automatically organize[s] a user's tabs into topics," notifies users of "website changes, like product restocks or price drops," and lets them create custom extensions from a written description, according to Apple.

The price-tracking feature, which Apple called Notify Me when it previewed Safari's new tools in June, moves a function retailers have long run through their own back-in-stock and price alert emails into the browser itself. The feature reached Safari when iOS 27 and macOS 27 shipped on September 14. Every iMac with M6 ships with macOS 27, so each one arrives with it on board.

The same version of Safari carries Apple's tracking restrictions. WebKit confirmed on October 19 that Safari on macOS 27 blocks network access to identity resolution infrastructure, the services that turn email addresses collected at login or newsletter sign-up into persistent tracking IDs. Households and small businesses buying the iMac get the price-watching browser and the tracking block together.

Elsewhere, users can create a Shortcuts automation by describing it and use intelligent photo editing in the Photos app. Apple names LM Studio Bionic and Topaz Studio among "a growing ecosystem of AI apps optimized for Apple silicon."

Local models on a family desktop

Apple pitches the iMac for "running local AI models, or vibe coding," and the pairing is telling. Vibe coding, the practice of building software by describing it to an AI model, sits in the same release as families managing busy calendars. Apple has courted the practice on the developer side too: it added agentic coding to Xcode in February.

The hardware sets the boundaries. A 14-billion parameter model at 4-bit precision, the size Apple used in its tests, needs roughly 7GB for its weights alone, by PPC Land's calculation, which fits comfortably in a 32GB iMac. A 70-billion parameter model at the same precision would need about 35GB, more than the iMac's maximum memory. When Meta and Apple ran Meta's 816-billion parameter Muse Spark Open model on two linked Mac Studios on October 15, each machine used an M5 Ultra with up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB per second of bandwidth. That is 16 times the iMac's maximum memory and about seven times its bandwidth.

The privacy framing is Apple's own. The release says the iMac is "a powerful platform for AI while preserving user privacy," and claims users can run AI models "all while keeping their data private." Running a model locally does keep prompts off a remote server, but Siri AI itself relies partly on server-side models, which is exactly where the daily limits apply.

Third-party AI on the Mac is moving in parallel. Google brought its Gemini Spark background agent to macOS on June 30, limited at launch to US Google AI Ultra subscribers paying $99.99 a month.

Design, display and the parts that did not change

Much of the machine is familiar. The display remains a 24-inch 4.5K Retina panel, with an actual diagonal of 23.5 inches, 500 nits of brightness and P3 wide color covering "over 1 billion colors." Apple claims it offers "5x more resolution and nearly 70 percent greater brightness than the bestselling 24-inch all-in-one PC," without naming that PC.

The colors are the same seven as in 2024: blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange and silver. The camera is a 12MP Center Stage unit with Desk View, which shows a top-down view of the desk. The sound system pairs two sets of force-cancelling woofers with two tweeters, six speakers in all, with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos support, and a three-microphone array. Keyboard, mouse and trackpad are color-matched and charge over USB-C. Continuity features let an iPhone user hand off tasks, share files and control the phone from the iMac.

macOS 27, which Apple names Golden Gate, adds a Settings slider that adjusts the Liquid Glass interface "anywhere from ultraclear to fully tinted," along with sharper app icons.

The release quotes Shelly Goldberg, Apple's vice president of Hardware Engineering. "iMac is the world's best all-in-one, and today it raises the bar yet again," Goldberg said. Apple's case rests on M6 and Siri AI, which, Goldberg said, mean "the new iMac has everything users need to run their businesses, manage their lives, and bring their ideas to life."

That small-business framing runs through the release. Apple illustrates the iMac running Bigin by Zoho, a CRM application, to "manage customer relationships, track sales, and streamline everyday workflows," and markets the colors as an addition to "homes, workspaces, and storefronts."

Environmental claims

Apple says the iMac uses 100% recycled aluminum in the stand, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100% recycled gold plating and tin solder in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. It is manufactured with 40% renewable electricity, such as wind and solar, across the supply chain, and its paper packaging is 100% fiber-based. Apple ties the machine to its goal of carbon neutrality across its entire footprint by 2030. The 2024 iMac release cited recycled gold plating, tin soldering and copper in multiple printed circuit boards, not all of them, and gave no renewable electricity percentage.

Why the price matters beyond the iMac

The iMac is the fourth Apple device this month to start at a higher price than its predecessor did at launch. The Apple TV 4K more than doubled to $299 on October 13, from $129 for the previous Wi-Fi model. The HomePod mini 2 went to $149 the same day, $50 above its predecessor. The iPad mini rose 40% to $699 on October 26. In each case Apple tied the new model to Siri AI, either at launch or in a promised update.

Apple's Mac business enters this cycle with momentum. Mac revenue reached $10.352 billion in the June quarter, up 29%, driven by laptops, and Apple warned that supply constraints tied to advanced process nodes would affect iPhone, Mac and iPad in the September quarter. In the March quarter, Mac revenue had risen 6% to $8.399 billion.

For advertisers and publishers, the hardware price is the smaller story. In the EU, the iMac is one of the few Apple screens where Siri AI runs at all, and its Spotlight answers and Safari price alerts sit between brands and buyers on every machine sold. Apple announced a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 and new AI features for Apple Creator Studio on the same day.

Whether buyers accept a $1,499 floor for the iMac will show up in Apple's Mac revenue over the coming quarters. The planned fee for heavier use of Siri AI, when Apple prices it, may matter more.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Apple, which announced the product, with Shelly Goldberg, its vice president of Hardware Engineering, as spokesperson. Klarna provides the Apple Upgrade leases. Affected parties include households, students, small businesses, EU users of Siri AI, and the retailers and publishers whose pages Safari and Siri AI now process.

What: A new 24-inch iMac with the M6 chip, up to 12 CPU and 12 GPU cores, Neural Accelerators in each GPU core, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, up to 170GB/s of memory bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and optional 2.5Gb Ethernet. It starts at $1,499, $200 above the 2024 M4 entry model, and several features that came with the $1,499 model in 2024 now require the $1,699 model. It runs macOS 27 with Siri AI, which is subject to daily server-side limits and a planned fee for expanded access.

When: Announced on October 27, 2026. Pre-orders open on October 28, and the iMac is available from Friday, November 6, 2026.

Where: Pre-orders in 35 countries and regions, including the US. Prices cited are US prices. Siri AI works on the iMac in the EU, unlike on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch there, but only in six languages.

Why: Apple is refreshing its Mac line with M6 and positioning the iMac as a platform for on-device and server-side AI. For the marketing community, each iMac adds a desktop on which Spotlight answers questions directly, Safari tracks price drops and restocks, and identity resolution services are blocked, while Apple's October hardware launches have consistently arrived at higher prices than the models they follow.