2026-10-27 · Source：ZDNet
Two full years passed before the colorful all-in-one moved past the M4, and the $1,499 starting price now anchors what buyers get from the newest Apple silicon.
Two years is a long stretch between silicon generations, and Apple's iMac has finally finished the wait. The colorful all-in-one has graduated from the M4 to the M6, landing at a starting price of $1,499.
The timing is the real story. An all-in-one is bought whole rather than upgraded piecemeal, so the gap between chip generations effectively defines each machine's usable horizon — and M4-era owners have now watched an entire generation pass before their hardware was superseded. That two-year rhythm matters beyond the desktop market, too: consumer machines are among the most visible public markers of where a vendor's silicon roadmap actually stands. Read this way, the iMac refresh is less a lifestyle update than a datapoint confirming the M6 has reached shipping hardware.
At $1,499, the entry configuration is the doorway into the M6 generation, and it frames the practical question sitting at the center of any M6-versus-M4 comparison: what has actually changed? For buyers, that delta is the whole decision. Anyone still running an M4 machine is weighing two years of chip progress against the cost of a new desktop, while first-time customers are deciding whether the base price buys enough of the new generation to matter.
For the AI-compute audience, the significance is quieter but not nothing. Generation transitions inside consumer desktops are a public read on silicon cadence, and the iMac's two-year clock has now been reset.
The bottom line is simple: the M4 is now the previous generation, and the $1,499 M6 iMac is the reference point every comparison from here forward starts from.
Tags: Apple · M6 · iMac · M4 · Apple Silicon · consumer desktop
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