Is The iMac the Forgotten Child of the M5 Era?
Apple
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Apple had a very busy release schedule earlier this month, with a new M5 MacBook Air, even more powerful M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, and the groundbreaking new MacBook Neo. However, one product that conspicuously hasn’t been refreshed is the company’s 24-inch iMac.
The all-in-one desktop, which was last updated in late 2024, remains stuck behind on Apple’s M4 chip. While the Mac mini also saw its last refresh around the same time, it’s arguably not quite as overdue.
The consensus is that if Apple was going to release a new iMac, it would have done so last fall when it first brought the M5 chip to the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and even the Vision Pro. By contrast, the Mac mini has always had a higher-end model with an M-series Pro chip, and since the M5 Pro wasn’t ready in October when the rest of the M5 models launched, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe Apple was holding off on that one.
It’s not the first time Apple has skipped an update to the 24-inch iMac. After releasing the new design in early 2021 with an M1 chip, we went nearly two and a half years before the M3 model appeared in late 2023, arriving alongside an entire MacBook Pro lineup. At the same time, Apple skipped a new Mac mini that year, preferring to save its efforts for the much more compact M4 and M4 Pro models that debuted in October 2024.
While we can’t rule out the possibility of an M5 iMac making a surprise appearance — stranger things have already happened lately — it’s likely Apple is holding off for at least an M6 chip at this point. However, the longer-term plan is a much bigger update that will transition the popular desktop Mac to an OLED display.
We first heard reports of this in December when South Korea’s The Elec picked up some buzz from Apple’s supply chain that suggested the company was looking at much larger 24-inch OLED panels that could really only be destined for one known product: the 24-inch iMac.
The report at the time indicated Apple would also up the brightness of the displays, possibly hitting 600 nits — a 20 percent increase over any iMac released in the past — with a 4480-by-2520 resolution at 218 pixels per inch.
By all reports, Apple was at a very early stage in this process, implying that the new iMac wouldn’t be appearing anytime in 2026. However, that also aligns with leaked product roadmaps that conspicuously omit any mention of the all-in-one desktop.
In other words, Apple could skip the iMac entirely this year. If that’s the case, we could be looking at a gap as long as three years between updates. Still, Apple may not want to wait until an OLED version is ready, so an M6 or M7 version could still appear before then.
That’s because while a new set of supply chain reports confirm The Elec’s December findings, they’re putting an even longer timeframe on the transition, suggesting we won’t see the OLED iMac before 2029 at the earliest.
This latest news comes from ZDNet Korea, which has some insight into Apple’s deals with Samsung Display and LG Display to supply the 24-inch OLED panels. The specs roughly align with what we heard last year, with the report listing a pixel density of 220 ppi.
According to the report, Apple has requested the two display makers to begin producing iMac OLED samples via their mass production facilities — samples being the key word here. In other words, these are to be sent to Apple for quality testing and refinement to ensure they meet the standards the company expects of a display that will go into its largest-screened Mac. What’s challenging here is that the 220 ppi is a much higher density than the 160 ppi Quantum Dot (QD-OLED) screens that Samsung is currently producing.
That’s not to say that ZDNet Korea’s timing is necessarily accurate either. The truth may lie somewhere in the middle, and Apple might even be aiming for an ambitious late-2027 release, as The Elec initially suggested. A lot of this depends on how fast the two display suppliers can get the proper panels ready and also guarantee they can crank out the necessary volume needed to manufacture the tens of millions of iMacs needed to fill customer demand.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
