Apple's iMac hasn't made sense for a long time

Summary

The iMac is increasingly irrelevant to Apple’s bottom line, even within the Mac segment.
Consumers have migrated to laptops like the MacBook Air, and to a lesser degree, headless desktops like the Mac mini.
Unless there’s an overhaul, the iMac could be in a terminal decline.

Apple updated the iMac with its M4 chip a few months ago, but you’d be forgiven for missing that, or at least forgetting it. The tech industry is a busy place, and later Apple news has made more of a splash, including the iPhone 16e and the updated MacBook Air. Much to the company’s chagrin, the further delay of Apple Intelligence features is another example. We won’t see Siri’s deeper app integration and contextual awareness until sometime later this year.

How did new iMacs generate so little impact, given the product’s historical importance to Apple? The truth, I think, is that iMacs have become an increasingly niche product — both because of Apple’s own marginalization and because of general industry trends. It’s difficult to justify buying one in 2025, and the product could be on its last legs.

24-inch M4 iMac

Apple’s 24-inch iMac is back and is nearly identical to its M3 counterpart. The only major differences are its more powerful chip and new colours.

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The intentional shift away from the iMac

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Anyone old enough to remember the original gumdrop iMac from 1998 knows how big a deal it was. While Windows PCs continued to dominate computers — and still do — the iMac almost single-handedly saved Apple from irrelevance. It was a stylish, all-in-one system that made it easy to get online, and was such a hit that it became a fixture of pop culture, no doubt helped by Apple’s own product placement in movies and TV shows. It was also notable for jettisoning legacy drives and ports in favor of CD-ROM and USB — putting Apple’s later refusal to drop Lightning in favor of USB-C in stark contrast, but I digress.

Ultimately, the iMac may really have been sidelined by other budget Macs, most notably the MacBook Air.

Versions of the iMac continued to be important for a while. The product was gradually overshadowed, though, first by the iPod in 2001, then the iPhone in 2007. It became incidental to Apple’s success — a product it could easily ignore, given that customers didn’t need ties to the Mac ecosystem to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Ultimately, though, the iMac may really have been sidelined by other budget Macs, most notably the MacBook Air. The Air wasn’t much of a budget product at first — in 2008, it cost $1,799 — but by 2010, you could get one for $999, giving people an affordable all-in-one Mac that was also portable. It’s now essentially the default Mac for people who don’t need an assortment of ports or high-end graphics performance.

Simultaneously, Apple also seems to have increased emphasis on the Mac mini, particularly after the switch to Apple Silicon in 2020. Indeed, the October 2024 overhaul of the Mini (including M4 chips) was arguably given more fanfare than the iMac, despite buyers still needing to shop for their own monitors or connect to a TV.

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The trend away from all-in-one desktops

We’re in the portable era

The brute fact is that the concept of an all-in-one PC is a relic of a bygone time. It made more sense when laptops were heavier and costlier, and people frequently needed (or wanted) a desktop display upgrade alongside the rest of their computer. I remember the first time I tried a 5K, 27-inch iMac — its graphics were so sharp, it felt like a revelation.

Display technology has largely settled down, though, so a separate monitor you buy today could last for many years. Financially, it makes far more sense to pair that with a headless Mac mini you can upgrade for the same cost as a PlayStation. Some people don’t even bother with monitors, now that 4K TVs with high refresh rates are commonplace.

The iMac is neither as portable as a MacBook Air nor as flexible as a Mac mini.

The computer industry has skewed away from desktops in general. Thin and affordable laptops are the norm, since just about any modern processor can handle things like web browsing and productivity apps, and portability is a selling point for couch potatoes and remote workers alike. Desktops can potentially offer more power for the same price — and better upgrade potential — but that mostly applies to Windows PCs targeted at gamers and media professionals. There’s not much call for a stationary tower PC to run Chrome, and on the Mac side, Apple Silicon is so hyper-optimized that it doesn’t lend itself to component upgrades anyway.

All of this makes the iMac a tough sell. It’s a computer that’s neither as portable as a MacBook Air nor as flexible as a Mac mini. It can make sense as a workstation, or a child’s first computer, but even then there may be better options. My own son uses a 2017 iPad, which was cheaper than any Mac, yet more than enough for his educational apps and videos.

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Could Apple revitalize the iMac?

A time to rethink

iMac 2023 front view with a keyboard and mouse.

The iMac is likely to stick around for a while longer, given that it does have a few use cases, but there’s also no denying that Apple is coming to a crossroads. Macs as a whole have seen sales declines in recent quarters, and if Apple leaves the iMac as-is apart from performance upgrades, that may only worsen the situation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the iMac go extinct by 2030.

Unless there’s an iMac overhaul, we may be witnessing the product’s final chapter.

That said, it’s not quite clear how Apple could revitalize the iMac. Personally, I’d love a modular model with support for insertable graphics cards and SSDs, but that seems dead in the water given the company’s insistence on a cheap, minimalist, tightly integrated machine. Anything more powerful and flexible might cannibalize the Mac Studio, and Apple would either have to build its own dedicated GPUs or support AMD and Nvidia cards. That last decision is unlikely, since Apple seems hellbent on increasing in-house chip design, and has never shown much respect for desktop gamers. This is the company that let Microsoft steal Halo, after all.

Who knows — maybe Apple will surprise us, as it does from time to time. Unless there’s an iMac overhaul, though, we may be witnessing the product’s final chapter.