Apple Skips the M5, Jumps Straight to M6 for a New iMac
The all-in-one gets Apple's first 2nm chip, arriving just ahead of the company's "Pro and Tell" event this week.
Apple is giving the iMac its first chip upgrade in two years, and it's skipping a generation to do it. The company introduced a new iMac today running on the M6 chip, bypassing the M5 entirely and leaping straight from the M4 model it launched back in 2023. Prices start at $1,499, and the timing is no accident: the announcement lands just ahead of Apple's "Pro and Tell" event on Wednesday.
The design itself looks largely untouched, so this is a chip refresh rather than a reimagined machine. But the chip itself is a meaningful jump. The M6 is Apple's first chip built on a 2nm process, a manufacturing shift that typically brings both speed and efficiency gains. It also packs a dual 16-core Neural Engine, the part of the chip responsible for handling on-device AI tasks, which Apple says will boost performance for those workloads specifically.
On the core counts, the base M6 configuration in the new iMac starts with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. That's a step up from the entry-level M4 iMac, which started at an 8-core CPU, according to The Verge's reporting.
This same M6 chip already made its debut elsewhere. Apple used it to power the Mac Mini back in August, so the iMac refresh effectively brings the company's all-in-one desktop in line with a chip that's already been out in the wild for a couple of months. Skipping the M5 for this particular machine means the generational leap feels bigger than a typical annual bump, jumping two chip families at once rather than one.
The broader context here is Apple's event scheduling. This iMac announcement is arriving as a preview or sidebar ahead of Wednesday's "Pro and Tell" event, suggesting Apple is clearing smaller hardware news out of the way before whatever bigger announcements are planned for that event.
Details beyond the chip, core counts, and starting price haven't been fully laid out yet. As more specifics emerge, they'll fill in the picture of just how far this M6 iMac moves the needle, but the headline change is clear: Apple's all-in-one desktop just got its most significant internal upgrade since the colorful M4 redesign, and it did it by leapfrogging an entire chip generation.
