Tech
Apple refreshes the iMac with M6 chips
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Published 10/27/2026 8:05:26 AM
Apple refreshes the iMac with M6 chips
The all-in-one desktop computer has been updated with a more powerful chip.
The all-in-one desktop computer has been updated with a more powerful chip.
is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
Apple is updating the iMac with M6 chips. The new iMac generation was introduced today, giving Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer a performance boost via the same chipset Apple launched with the Mac Mini in August. Prices start from $1,499, and the design otherwise appears largely unchanged. The update was announced ahead of Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event that’s scheduled to take place on Wednesday.
This refresh comes two years after Apple gave the iMac an overhaul with M4 chips, meaning we’re skipping the M5 series entirely on this hardware. That should make this upgrade more meaningful. The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip and includes a dual 16-core Neural Engine that can boost performance when running on-device AI tasks. According to Apple’s press release, the M6-powered iMac “delivers up to 5x faster on-device AI performance” compared with the M4 model.
The M6 configurations start from a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU for $1,499, which is the same price as the 8-core CPU-equipped M4 iMac. There’s also a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU starting at $1,699. Preorders will launch at 1:10PM ET on October 28th, and it’ll be fully available starting November 6th.
Besides the chip upgrade, the new iMac isn’t getting much in the way of a hardware refresh. It now has Apple’s N1 wireless networking chip, alongside Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 on the base model instead of just the higher-spec variant. It still carries over the same Thunderbolt limitations as the M4 iMac, however — you get only two ports on the 10-core version, and four on the 12-core upgrade.
There are also some new restrictions and fees included in the configuration options. If you want to customize the iMac with a Magic Trackpad instead of a Magic Mouse, it’ll cost you an extra $50, despite this being a free switch on the previous iMac. Ethernet has been upgraded from 1 gigabit to 2.5 gigabit, but that’s now a $30 premium upgrade compared with sticking with a Wi-Fi only configuration. Apple also won’t let you configure the M6 iMac with a Magic Keyboard that has Touch ID but not a numeric keypad — despite showing an image of that on the new iMac announcement page.
If you were hoping for some new color options then, hard luck. Apple is offering the exact same color variants as it did with the M4, to the point where it’s just reused some of the marketing imagery and updated them to display more up-to-date content. The M6 chip provides a nice performance boost, but otherwise this is a small spec bump for Apple’s colorful all-in-one.
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
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