The colours of speed

It may have got the royal ignore for 2022 but for 2023, the iMac gets the brand new M3 silicon. Can Apple's cutest also be the fastest?

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■ The iMac stands as a stark reminder of what turned the fortunes around for the company under Steve Jobs’s second stint. In its 2023 avatar, the M3-equipped iMac doesn’t look any different to the 2021 M1 model, but the heads won’t stop turning anyway.

■ The M3 is mighty enough to even trump the M2 Pro from earlier this year on single-core Geekbench scores. It provides improvements over the M1 when it comes to GPU performance with support for hardwareaccelerated ray-tracing for games and Dynamic Cache.

■ The always-dependable colour accuracy of the display and its resistance to glare are other big pluses too. Not just on games, but even on music and videos. The builtin six-speaker audio still is mind-boggling, to say the least and makes all but the best desktop speakers redundant.

■ Comparing it to our office M1 iMac, the same 650MB InDesign file opened 40% faster on the M3 iMac! It’s only when the going gets rough, playing Lies of P and syncing more than 9700 files on Adobe Creative Cloud simultaneously, for example, do the internal fans purr away. Never intrusive or loud even.

Tech specs

Processor Apple M3 (8-core CPU, 10-core GPU) Memory 24GB unified Storage 1TB Display 24in 4480x2520 pixels Brightness 500nits Camera 1080p FaceTime