Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Nov. 7, Apple recently launched a brand new 24-inch iMac with an M3 chip, starting at 10999 yuan.

The new iMac offers seven dazzling colors of green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and silver, as well as new wallpaper with the same series of colors and novel design, with a thickness of only 11.5mm.

The biggest highlight is the M3 chip, while the iMac has not been updated since 2021, when it was equipped with the M1 chip. The M3 chip integrates 8 cores of CPU and up to 10 cores of graphics processors, which is up to 2 times faster than the previous generation of M1 chips.

Relying on the new generation of GPUs on the M3 chip, iMac supports hardware-accelerated mesh shading and raytracing to provide more accurate lighting, reflections and shadows for an extremely realistic gaming experience. With the help of a 16-core neural network engine and the latest media processing engine, iMac can also bring fast machine learning and video performance.

CTOnews.com briefly summarizes the comments of foreign science and technology media on the 24-inch M3 iMac as follows:

Matt Hanson of TechRadar finds it disappointing that the new iMac continues to use the Lightning port on its keyboard, panel and mouse: for example, the charging port of the mouse is still at the bottom, and Apple continues to maintain its traditional design. Apple should abandon the increasingly obsolete Lightning port and adopt the USB-C port.

Early Geekbench 6 benchmark results showed that the M3 chip was 40 per cent faster than the M1 used in iMac before 2021.

Digital Trends's Luke Larsen talks about the performance improvements brought about by the M3 chip: it's a big leap from M1 to M3. Even if you think the performance changes from generation to generation are not very exciting, skipping one generation can make a significant difference.

When you look at the Cinebench R23 score, M3 is 20% faster in both single-core and multi-core, which is a huge performance improvement.

This means that no matter what the difficult task is, the speed of the M3 iMac will increase by at least 20 per cent. A good example is the simple video coding test in Handbrake. M3 iMac encodes the same video as H.265, which is 27% faster than M1 iMac.

The model I received was a 10-core GPU model, and with the addition of dynamic caching (Dynamic Caching), this little iMac is a very reliable graphics small engine. In the Cinebench 2024 GPU test, although there were six fewer GPU cores, it was 35% faster than the M1 Pro in the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

In the same graphics test, M3 iMac is 20% higher than M2 Pro in Mac mini. I think this is mainly due to dynamic caching, which handles a lot of heavy work.

Tom's Hardware's Brandon Hill commented that iMac has always been a fairly economical system for Mac users who want to "provide only the basics" in their daily computers. The screen is large and bright with bright colors. The minimalist design can be integrated with almost any decoration (you can choose from a variety of colors to match), and the new Apple M3 chip has a significant performance improvement compared to the M1 model, which was first unveiled in 2021.

Unfortunately, the new iMac has many "traps". Although the starting price of $1299 is attractive, only 8GB's unified memory and 256GB's SSD are available.

If you want to use it for a longer time, you need to pay an extra $200 to upgrade to 16GB unified memory, and upgrading storage is also very expensive.

If you want to upgrade to support Gigabit Ethernet, you will need to pay an extra $30.

And with only two Thunderbolt 4 ports standard, you need to spend another $1499 to get two additional Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB 3.0ports.

Apple's new iMac needs to be reconsidered in terms of pricing and available configuration, but it is still an excellent all-in-one machine.

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