Once again, the iMac may come to Apple’s rescue!

Hands up if you love the iMac!

I’m gonna put my neck on the line here and say that if you’re reading this, or any of my stories come to that, then there’s a very good chance that at some point or another, you’ll have owned an iMac.

It was an iMac that was my first proper Mac. In fact, I still own it. I think I’ve owned five iMacs over the years. They’ve always been solid machines that go on forever, and that you can handle all kinds of work on. With that single cable, they are tidy and that all-in-one design is timeless.

I wrote recently about the love affair we have with iMacs, so I won’t go over that again in this story. Since writing that piece, though, I’ve started to see quite a few rumours about what the next generation of iMac may hold in store for us.

It got me interested, so I thought it might be worth jotting down in one place all the rumblings I’ve heard to see what you make of them and what your thoughts are.

iMac and OLED

Apple is on a bit of a mission to roll out OLED across as many of its devices as quickly as possible.

We’ve had OLED watches, iPhones and an OLED iPad Pro, and it now seems likely that we’ll soon be getting both an OLED MacBook Pro and an iPad mini.

Although it seems we may have to wait a little while, it looks as if we may eventually get an OLED iMac too.

Apple has approached their panel suppliers, Samsung and LG, asking them to produce some sample 24-inch OLED panels with at least 600 nits of brightness and the same 218 pixels-per-inch that we currently have. If we do see a 24-inch OLED display, that would be the largest OLED panel, by quite some distance, that Apple would ever have used on any of its devices.

Every time I use my current M3 iMac, I’m still impressed by the display, but an iMac with an even brighter OLED display…well, that would take it to another level altogether!

OLED is one of those things that, by itself, you don’t fully appreciate. It’s only when you A/B test side-by-side that you can see just how much better OLED is than a mini LED display.

Although the improved power efficiency isn’t particularly important when it comes to desktop Macs, it can never be a bad thing, and of course you’ll benefit from all the other benefits of an OLED display too, such as a wider colour gamut, richer, deeper blacks, more vibrancy and much higher levels of contrast.

However, whenever I write about the iMac, the one comment that always crops up is that the current 24-inch screen just isn’t large enough. Although I’ve never found it small or cramped, it seems I’m in the minority.

If we do get a major overhaul to the iMac over the next few years, it’s possible that the unthinkable might yet happen and that the return of an iMac Pro type of machine may be a real possibility.

Since the advent of the Mac Studio and the Studio Display, I’d always assumed that the days of a large, powerful iMac were strictly in the rear view mirror, but now I can see a way forward that may make it a possibility.

The iMac Ultra days may be coming

The reason for my change of heart has something to do with the fact that we now seem to be in the era of the Ultra.

I don’t think the name Ultra necessarily means the fastest – I think that Ultra models represent the most cutting-edge or advanced versions of a device. So far, we only have a Watch Ultra, but the rumours suggest that an iPhone Ultra and MacBook Ultra are on the cards as well.

There are even some suggestions that an iPad Ultra is being discussed too.

The one gaping and obvious hole in Apple’s current lineup is a genuine, large, powerful desktop – and that’s where I think Apple could create a brand new division of the iMac – an iMac Ultra. A no-bars-held, fully tripped-out iMac aimed squarely at prosumers.

Now that the Mac Pro has been retired, it kind of opens the door for Apple to plug that gap with a new, big beast of a desktop machine, which, although expensive, would still be within reach for those who need some extra size and grunt.

By the time 2029 comes about (which is when it looks likely these new iMacs will land), my fag-packet maths reckons we should be on the M8 chip by then, so let’s say that the iMac Ultra has an M8 Ultra chip with the crazy speed, efficiency and performance that would clearly bring with it.

The Mac Pro, in whatever guise, was never a popular machine, so I can’t see Apple ever going back to a tower-type design if they do decide to once again offer a powerful all-in-one desktop Mac.

The iMac, however, has always been popular, recognisable and commercially successful. And just imagine what a larger-bodied iMac Ultra would have room to house!

I’m not suggesting that an iMac Ultra would be the quickest Mac out there – I’m sure that would still be a fully spec’d Mac Studio with whatever the latest Ultra chip is at that point.

Out of interest, I just checked out how much I could spend on a Mac Studio today – and it’s an eye-watering £14,299!

Anyway, back in the land of reality…the last iMac Pro, which was discontinued 10 years ago, had a 27-inch, 5K display. I would imagine that they would want this iMac Ultra to make quite a splash, so I wonder if they may drop in a 32-inch 6K display. I know it’s not as straightforward as I’m making it sound here, but basically I’m suggesting that they could drop in the old Pro Display XDR panel.

We’d have enough space on a 32-inch Mac to go crazy with Thunderbolt 5 ports, two 10 Gb Ethernet ports so that it’s ready to network, an SD card slot, maybe even a micro SD card slot too, and some HDMI ports as well, of course. Obviously, we’d have the latest and quickest Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules alongside the latest N-series chip from Apple inside too.

You get where I’m coming from, right?

With all that available space, we’d have all the room in the world to fill this new Mac to the gills with all the I/O we could ever dream of. And although Apple silicon Macs aren’t modular in the truest sense of the word, with a bunch of Thunderbolt 5 ports, it’s not as important as it once used to be. Expansion is a genuine option.

And as a nod to its heritage, why not release this iMac Ultra in that sexy space black of the original iMac Pro from ten years back, along with matching accessories?

C’mon – that thing would look amazing!

The new iMac lineup

So, my iMac lineup would look like this – a 24-inch consumer-grade iMac with a 5K OLED display and then a 32-inch iMac Ultra with a 6K mini LED display.

The base iMac would come with the latest entry-level chip, with everything else, other than the display, staying the same as we have now, so keeping it relatively affordable and then we go mad with the iMac Ultra.

A high’ish-end Mac like this is always going to be more niche than, say, a standard iMac or a MacBook Pro, but it’s an obvious gap that Apple could easily fill and with a machine that’s more desirable than the old tower Mac Pros.

Price would clearly be key with the iMac Ultra, and it’s a bit tough to work out where it would be pitched. The four-port, 24-inch iMac currently starts at £1699 with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, so possibly the OLED version of that would start at £1999 – does that sound about right?

The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is currently tough to get a guide from as you can only spec it with a whopping 96 GB of RAM. A better guide is the M4 Max Mac Studio, though with some reasonable specs, that costs around £3500.

We obviously need to factor in that 32-inch display to the costs. The display I’m suggesting is not the latest or greatest, so it may be more affordable than the £5000 ticket price of that old Pro Display XDR suggested.

And let’s all hope that by 2029 the current squeeze on memory is back under control!

So, how about if the iMac Ultra with an M8 Ultra chip, 512 GB of storage and 64 GB of RAM starts at around £4850. Am I in the right ballpark?

I know that’s not exactly loose change, but it straddles that consumer/prosumer line neatly and gives Apple back a powerful, all-in-one, desirable desktop Mac that would be mighty powerful and yet marketable and approachable.

I may have had too much sun, but it sort of makes sense to me…at least!