Nadella had his missteps too. He’d always wanted his moonshot. He wanted to reestablish Microsoft as a visionary company. As he put it in his 2017 book Hit Refresh, three technology shifts were essential to the company’s future: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and mixed reality. Nadella made his first bold bet on … mixed reality. Oops.
That bet took the form of a big, clumsy, $3,000-plus headset called the HoloLens, introduced in 2016, which laid a digital scrim over the view of the world in its visor. When demoed for the first time to the press, it blew minds-but then it was very expensive and not terribly useful. It now resides in the gadget equivalent of a bardo.
Chalk that up to the power of the M1 then. It is a case similar to the MacBook Pro M4: it is suffering from trying to innovate on an already good thing. To mitigate that, in addition to touting a raw performance boost on this, its fourth trip to the well, Apple is leaning hard on artificial intelligence features in Apple Intelligence, powered by its 16-core Neural Engine and faster unified memory (which you can configure with up to 32 GB). The latter is actually part of a pretty big deal: The base amount of RAM on the iMac has doubled from 8 to 16 GB, a game-changing upgrade for entry-level shoppers.
So yes, you’ll still be able to use Apple Intelligence features on older iMacs (all the way back to the M1), but on the M4 they’ll be speedier. Officially, three times faster than on the iMac M1.
Design Duty
The iMac has always been built around offering color options to consumers—what other computer brand is available in seven colors? The iMac continues down that road. This year the same seven color options remain, but Apple now calls them “fresh shades,” implying they are different: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, and blue join colorless silver. While they are reportedly a bit lighter, putting the pink M4 I was sent for review next to pictures of pink M3 iMacs didn’t show me any changes that I could identify. Maybe putting an M3 and M4 together would show more of a difference, but whatever it is, it’s subtle.
Peripherals are color-matched to the unit you buy, right down to the cables—but ending at the invariably white power brick. While we’re on peripherals, a shout-out to Apple for upgrading the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse (and optional Magic Trackpad) to USB-C ports from the Lightning ports shipping on peripherals with the iMac M3. But finally, it means everything in the ecosystem is on one cable format, and you can charge everything as needed, using a single wire to top off extra devices like your phone. But yes, that still means charging the unchanged, awful Magic Mouse upside-down, in dead cockroach mode.
The iMac M4 still comes in many flavors, starting with the $1,299 variant containing an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage—and just two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. Sorry, there’s no Thunderbolt 5 on offer in the iMac, unlike the MacBook Pro or Mac Mini with M4 Pro. At least it now supports two 6K external displays, not just one. Note that Apple’s fancier peripherals still cost extra no matter how you configure the machine, including the Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keyboard ($30) and Magic Trackpad ($50).
Tick up the price ladder and you’ll add additional power and storage space, USB ports, a better keyboard (with a Touch ID fingerprint reader), and more. My tested configuration—a full $1,000 pricier at $2,299—included a passel of upgrades comprising a 10-core CPU and GPU, 24 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage, four USB ports, gigabit Ethernet on the power brick, and Apple’s new nano-texture glass upgrade for the 24-inch screen.
This lattermost option alone is a $200 upgrade, but it’s the best of the bunch and the one you should absolutely put on your iMac. Much as I said in my review of the MacBook Pro M4 Pro, it makes the 4,480 x 2,520-pixel display look like a glare-free photograph. It’s hard to imagine using the machine without it—though I’m still baffled as to why the iMac does not feature a touchscreen, which is all but standard among competing all-in-ones smaller than 30 inches in size.
Another notable upgrade is the webcam, which is now an impressive 12-megapixel sensor, up from a lowly 2.1-megapixel version in the iMac M3. The Center Stage feature is effective, auto-centering the frame during video calls even if you’re moving around. Apple’s new Desk View feature is also in the mix. Designed primarily for education purposes, this lets you add a top-down view of your desk to your video stream so you don’t have to hold things up to the camera lens. It’s certainly a niche feature, but some may find it useful. The three-microphone and six-speaker setup from the iMac M3 is still there, and both are as sharp as ever.
There are only two things on my colleague Stolyar’s 2023 iMac M3 “Tired” list that Apple didn’t address with this 2024 release. The first is a lack of screen height adjustability, which I’m willing to give Apple a pass on. For whatever reason, adjustable height is uncommon on 24-inch all-in-ones across the board, and the iMac does at least have a tilt feature, which is about as much as I expect in a machine of this size.
The other problem is more prickly: the price. Even at its base price of $1,299, the iMac is expensive compared with other smaller all-in-ones. And fully loaded, it’s significantly more dear than many Windows all-in-ones that boast nearly twice the LCD surface area. That’s a tough challenge to overcome.
If you’ve made it this far in the review, there’s a good chance you’re already sporting an Apple silicon iMac on your desk. That’s a whole other problem. Do the upgrades in the M4 edition merit junking-your old computer-to get your hands on this new one? Only your accountant can help you answer that one.
Hello, my name is Alfie and I live on the Isle of Wight. I love Cricket, Snooker, Mountain Biking, Goalkeeping, Art, Golf, and Film Making!
