Apple has confirmed it has no plans to release a 27-inch iMac in the immediate future. The news comes on the same day that reviews for Apple’s 24-inch iMac M3 and MacBook Pro M3 went live, with the company urging pro users who had been waiting for a 27-inch iMac update to go with a Mac Studio or Mac Pro instead.
An Apple representative confirmed that a 27-inch iMac with Apple silicon won’t be arriving soon to The Verge. Apple last updated the 27-inch iMac in 2020, just a few months before Apple silicon was released to the world. It never saw Apple Silicon, instead being stuck on older Intel chips. Apple discontinued the product in 2021, eventually delisting it the next year.
Despite that, pro users held out hope for a new 27-inch iMac, and even among new Mac launches this fall, reports were mounting that Apple planned a release of a 27-inch iMac in 2024. Unlike the 24-inch iMac, which is targeted at home and office use, the 27-inch model has traditionally been a pro-focused model that could scale to accommodate more powerful processors. The 24-inch iMac, for example, is stuck on the base M3 processor and likely won’t see an update to the more powerful M3 Pro or M3 Max.
Even with the release of a new 24-inch iMac, which hasn’t seen an update since the original M1 processor, our iMac M3 review starts with: “There’s a new iMac. It’s not the one everyone’s been waiting for — the one with a larger screen and an M3 Pro.”
Although it doesn’t look like we’ll get a 27-inch iMac any time soon, The Verge notes that the door is still open for larger models. There are still rumors that Apple is prepping a 32-inch iMac for a release in either 2024 or 2025. Given the news about the 27-inch iMac, however, that seems unlikely. Apple seems to be focusing its effort on the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, combined with the 27-inch Studio Display.
In the future, it’s possible Apple will revisit the 27-inch iMac, but that also seems unlikely. Since the release of the M1, Apple has focused less on its pro products, with the Mac Pro only transitioning to Apple silicon earlier this year.
Adding on top of the news, journalist Mark Gurman poked fun at the report saying that there are no plans for a 21.5-inch iMac either, which previously sat alongside the 27-inch model. We weren’t expecting a new 21.5-inch model regardless, but Gurman has reported that Apple looking toward a 32-inch iMac to launch in late 2024 or early 2025, but it’s too soon to say if that could happen with any certainty.
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