Evolution of iMac, past, present and Apple Silicon Future

0:00 When Steve Jobs walked out on to the stage in August of 1998 introducing the iMac, 10 months after Apple’s new management team had taken over, the company was in trouble.
0:47 The Macintosh 128K
2:04 Steve Jobs Away from Apple
2:47 Jobs Returns to Apple, cancels products
3:08 iMac G3 Introduction
4:30 iMac G4
5:31 iMac G5
6:03 Intel comes to iMac
6:21 Aluminium iMacs
6:47 2009 UniBody iMac
7:08 2012 Slim Unibody iMac
7:28 Retina 5K iMac
7:46 iMac Pro
8:16 The Future - Apple Silicon iMacs
8:46 Projected M1X performance
10:03 iMac 2021 Redesign
11:05 New iMac cameras - 4k FaceTime and FaceID iMacs?
12:24 iMac Keyboard, Mouse, Trackpad and MagSafe?
12:57 Apple Pencil and iMac?
13:36 Bring Color back to the Mac

Renders via https://twitter.com/apple_tomorrow?s=21

I’m iCave Dave, and if you want all the latest Apple news every weekday, smash the like button, and if you subscribe and ring the bell too, make sure you post #notificationsquad up in the comments so I can say thanks in the next one.

Of course, Apple also put out their iMac Pro in 2017 as something of a stop gap while the Mac Pro was still on the horizon, bringing the beautiful Space Grey finish, Xeon W chips with up to 18 cores, expandability to 512GB of Ram and Vega64X graphics.

So we come to what Apple has in store for the iMac - Apple Silicon iMacs.

Apple Silicon has already arrived and revolutionised the Mac mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13” in the entry level products, and their performance is overtaking a number of their higher priced siblings, even if people are sad they can’t plug in eGPUs and banks of monitors right now. I get it, I’ll be coming down from 3 to 2 displays when my Mac mini arrives.

The M1 right now, if we’re looking at pure Geekbench numbers in single core destroys every other Mac ever, and in multicore beats every Mac Notebook ever, sitting right between the 2013 12 Core Mac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro 8 Core, with only the iMac Pro and the iMac with i9 9900K and 10910K versions above them, along with the 12, 16, 24 and 28 Core 2019 Mac Pros, which top out at over $50,000.
Even the integrated graphics sit around the Nvidia GTX 1050ti’s performance.

So the M1X that we expect to come in the first Apple Silicon iMacs is likely to push the SOC to 12 or 16 cores, up from 8 in the M1, with 4 of those remaining as efficiency cores, and 8-12 performance cores. The single core performance will be fairly aligned with M1, with just more cores added to the Performance side and more cores most likely added to the current 8 core GPU too. The open GL score for 8 Cores is around 18300, so doubling the cores there would put it in the region of AMD Radeon Pro 530 and Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB. Now this is assuming they *Just* double those cores. We’ll see.

But remember how the iMac has basically looked the same since 2009, at least from where you’ll be sitting while you use it? Those inch thick bezels are looking pretty chunky in 2021, and generally the design is starting to look a little aged, even if the design is still iconic and cool. The display sizes have been the same since 2009 too, so what could a 2021 version of the iMac give us?

For starters, it seems everyone is expecting bigger displays, and that does make sense, as you can see Apple has consistently increased display sizes over the years, and with smaller bezels, we can fit bigger displays in without increasing the footprint too much. Expect 23-25” smaller iMacs and 30-32” for the larger ones, and most likely 5k and 6k panels coming to each respectively.

Apple Silicon also has the image signal processors from iPhone as a trick up its sleeve, which is why even with the same 720p webcams in the MacBooks, the video coming out looks better. The problem that the MacBooks have though is the thin lids are near impossible to squeeze better sensors into. But assuming the iMac takes on the iPad Pro and iPhone design language, razor thin edges will be replaced by a little slab, with plenty of depth for a 4K FaceTime camera

Also, where Apple’s Notebooks have TouchID built in, the iMac with its wireless peripherals would be a perfect candidate to include FaceID unlock. And PLEASE, let it do multi user support.
The Magic Mouse with its current “shove a lightning cable in the bottom” elegance could well be fixed easily with MagSafe - same for the keyboard and trackpads, and build a MagSafe charger into the iMac’s foot.

I’ve said for a while, if the stand lets the iMac move further too, folding down to an easel or drawing board angle, around 30 degrees would make a great experience with Apple Pencil too, though I don’t think regular touch support would be a great experience.

And of course, it will support more external displays than M1 - probably way more if you choose to daisy chain them, but certainly at least 2 external displays.