My trustworthy iMac 5K is staring to show signs of aging. If you're in the same boat as I am, you'll want to listen up.
Right now you can get the 2023 iMac 24-inch (M3/256GB) on sale for $1,199 at Amazon. That's $100 off and the lowest price I've seen on Apple's new Mac. It's also one of the best Apple deals you can get.
The new M3-based iMac is the best all-in-one computer on the market. In our iMac M3 review we called it the best iMac yet and the best all-in-one for families. The new Apple M3 chip makes this iMac more capable of multi-tasking, gaming and getting things done than any iMac before it.
In our testing, we never felt limited or bogged down by the system's lack of resources, and we were able to seamlessly go from task to task while keeping 20+ tabs open in Chrome and streaming music from iTunes with absolutely zero slowdown. In our Geekbench 5 (single-core) test, the new iMac hit a 2,235 score. By comparison, the HP Envy 34 (2022) scored 1,621 and the iMac M1 scored 1,739.
If you're deciding between the Mac mini M2 ($499 at Amazon) or the iMac M3, it's worth mentioning that the performance differences are small in a few areas. While the M3 chip outperforms the M2 in basically every test, the difference was pretty meager in terms of raw CPU performance and disk read/write speeds.
Even in our video editing test, which times how long it takes a PC to transcode a 4K video file down to 1080p using Handbrake, the M2 Mac mini is just as fast as the new iMac M3 and capable of converting our test file in 6 minutes and 46 seconds. Likewise, if you have an iMac M1, there's no massive performance upgrade in the new iMac M3, despite the fact that it skips over the M2 processor.
That's not to say you shouldn't get the iMac M3. It's a solid machine and rarely on sale.
