Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs

By AppleInsider Staff

Assuming last minute snags are avoided, the coming weeks should bring new iMacs, rounding out Apple's 2008 hardware introductions as the company enters the holiday shopping season with one of its strongest product portfolios ever.

Avid AppleInsider readers will notice that our little 2008 hardware roadmap -- published back in August and reprinted below -- has thus far panned out quite nicely, clearing the way for new iMac models to edge their way to market sometime in the next four weeks.

People familiar with the company's plans have said changes to the iMac family will largely consist of performance improvements and technology refreshes. And while there's admittedly been few concrete details to go by since the August report, this week's notebook overhauls offer a window into the future of the iMac line, which sports an architectural resemblance to the MacBook lines.

CPU

While the processors used in the existing iMacs largely resemble those of Intel's current Montevina-based offerings, they're actually a special run of the chipmaker's Santa Rosa-based offerings developed at Apple's request. They operate at high clock speeds and support a faster 1066MHz bus versus the 800MHz of the Santa Rosa-based parts that were available to the broader market at the time.

Since then, Intel has unleashed its Montevina (Centrino 2) platform, which umbrellas new Core 2 Duos that are shipping inside the new unibody MacBooks, and are destined for the fall iMac line at clock speeds close to those currently available.

Intel has also been working diligently on quad-core mobile chips that should eventually find their way into iMacs, especially around next year's release of Snow Leopard; the operating system will include Grand Central technology designed to leverage Macs with an increasing number of processor cores.

As it stands, the chipmaker currently offers a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme mobile processor that sports a similar thermal envelope to the special run 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo employed by the existing top-of-the-line iMac. With its $1000+ price tag, however, Apple may be hesitant to use the chip even if there doesn't appear to be anything else stopping the firm from adopting the chip this year for a high-end iMac.

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