New Kaby Lake iMacs arrive from Apple

At its WWDC keynote today, Apple announced that it is updating the iMac line with Intel's Kaby Lake processors and will provide upgrades to displays, memory, storage, and I/O ports.

The new displays are 43 percent brighter than previous ones, with 500 nits and 10-bit dithering and the capability to reproduce 1 billion colors. New iMacs will be upgradeable to 64GB of RAM on 27-inch configurations and 32GB RAM on the 21.5-inch models.

Fusion drives—which include both SSD and spinning disk—will be standard on all new 27-inch configurations, and the SSD will be up to 50 percent faster, Apple said. The I/O upgrade involves two USB-C connectors that support Thunderbolt 3.

The 21.5-inch model will have Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 for a graphics speed boost of up to 80 percent. The iMac Retina 4K 21.5-inch, meanwhile, will have a Radeon Pro 555 or 560 and up to 4GB VRAM.

The iMac Retina 5K 27-inch will have a Radeon Pro 570, 575, or 580 and up to 8GB VRAM.

Prices will start at $1,099 for the base 21.5-inch model, at $1,299 for the 4K 21.5-inch model, and at $1,799 for the iMac Retina 5K 27-inch model.

iMac Pro sneak peek

Apple today also gave a sneak peek of the upcoming iMac Pro, which will ship at the end of the year with an 8-core Intel Xeon processor, with options going up to 18 cores. It will have the same design as the current 27-inch model but with a new Space Gray finish. Apple said it had to rethink the thermal architecture in order to get the more powerful processors into the current body.

The iMac Pro will have AMD Radeon Vega graphics with up to 16GB of VRAM. It will have SSDs with storage of 1TB to 4TB, four Thunderbolt 3 ports, and built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This image shows some more of the iMac Pro specs:

Apple also promised performance of up to 22 teraflops. The starting configuration for the iMac Pro will start at $4,999. RAM will range from 32GB to 128GB. It will have a Retina 5K display and can drive external 5K displays.

This article was updated to correct the pricing of the 4K 21.5-inch model.