A 24-inch iMac with a 24-inch widescreen display joins the 17- and 20-inch models, and iMac prices now start at just R10 499. According to the company, every iMac also includes a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing out-of-the-box; Apple's Front Row media experience; and iLife '06, the next generation of Apple's suite of digital lifestyle applications.

"Every iMac - from the R10 499 model up through the 24-inch widescreen model - now features Core 2 Duo performance," says Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

The iMac line-up includes four models: a 1,83GHz and a 2GHz 17-inch, a 2,16GHz 20-inch and the 2,16GHz 24-inch iMac, and features the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which aims to deliver up to 50% faster performance than the previous 20-inch iMac running industry standard benchmarks.

Claimed to be suitable for both consumers and professionals, the 24-inch iMac features a 24-inch widescreen LCD display with a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution, which is designed to offer 30% more screen real estate than the 20-inch model and a brighter display, which aims to make reading text and viewing images even easier.

The 24-inch iMac includes a 2,16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB of shared L2 cache, 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory, a 250GB Serial ATA hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 128MB of GDDR3 memory and a SuperDrive for burning professional-quality DVDs, the company says.

Users can configure the 24-inch iMac with a 2,33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up to 3GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory, a 500GB Serial ATA hard drive and the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory for outstanding graphics performance, Apple concludes.