The chin gives you a good touch-point for adjusting the angle of the display and the rotation angle of the entire base, without having to worry about touching the screen/screen bezel and getting finger prints on it.
> The iMac is basically the same as the M4 iPad Pro, and the iPad Pro doesn't have a chin.
Cooling seems like it might be a factor here. The iMac's display is probably going to be run at a brighter (and thus hotter) setting AND it's more likely to be used to do things that require high load for extended periods of time, so putting it in its own space probably helps.
Yes that's mostly the reason. But considering there are report of display issues like we used to on poorly cooled Intel iMac (those things would get to 90 degree at the PSU, being over 50 degrees on the aluminum case outside) I would say this design is largely a failure.
They should just have separated everything in the foot, that would have made sense.
Some sort of modern Sunflower iMac if you will.
But Apple is more obsessed with thinness than practical design, so we get an impossibly thin iMac will all the flaws that brings...
iMac has active cooling, more ports and more power available to it to drive those ports (though the PSU is external, it’s still gotta have the internal circuitry to deliver that).
For something that's literally designed to sit on a desk, yes... it's ridiculous to make it thinner in a dimension you never see vs one that you see all the time.
From the ifixit teardown of the previous M1 model [1], it seems that all the compute is going in the chin.
They can't put the compute in the back of the display itself, while maintaining the same thickness like an iPad (which has the same CPU), because the room behind the displays is dominated by the speaker system, allowing the iMac to have surprisingly good audio quality despite being so thin.
Someone got into their mind that it was important that everything is as thin as possible - hence the chin.
I miss the times when they used the form factor to actually make new shapes - both the sunflower and the cube looks more futuristic than the 2024 iMac.
