8 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2021
MACUSER M1 PRO AND M1 MAXEven though they’ve been engineered for
a laptop’s power envelope, they’re so
powerful—faster than the Mac Pro!—that
they’ll fit well into almost any desktop
computer Apple sees fit to make.
Let’s start with one of the last Intel
Macs still standing: the 27-inch iMac.
Earlier this year, Apple tapped its fairy
wand on the 21.5-inch iMac and turned it
into a 24-inch M1 model. The 27-inch
model is rumored to be heading toward a
new life as a 30-inch model, and given the
high-end Intel chips available at the top of
the iMac line, it’s hard not to see at least
the M1 Pro going into a new, larger iMac.
The M1 processor is limited in terms of
both RAM and ports, and a larger iMac
needs both. For
years now,
Apple has seen
an increasing
number of
professional
Mac users (I’m
one of them!)
gravitate toward
the larger iMac,
which has
provided them
some pretty
impressive
processors and
graphics cards
at high-end
configurations. (There’s a reason that the
current 27-inch iMac Pro has two
Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C ports, four
USB-A ports, and an SD card reader!) As a
result, the M1 Pro seems like a perfect fit
for a larger iMac.
If Apple can fit the M1 Max and its 32
GPU cores in both the 14- and 16-inch
MacBook Pros, it can also fit inside an
iMac. When it comes, I would expect that
the new, larger iMac will be available in a
base model similar to that of the MacBook
Pro–an M1 Pro, perhaps with similar
reduced CPU and GPU core counts. But
higher-end configurations will abound,
probably matching all of those offered on
the MacBook Pros.An M1 Pro seems like a perfect replacement for the 27-inch iMac.