Touting the 24-inch model, which offers a high-definition-level screen resolution of 1920 pixels by 1200 pixels, Dave Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing, said: "This is a price that we think both consumers and professionals will love. You get professional-level performance in a sleek integrated iMac design."

Apple officials Wednesday also unveiled changes to the company's Mac mini computers, with both of the latest models offering dual-core processing power, albeit using older Intel Core Duo processors rather than the newer Core 2 Duo chips. Despite faster processors in both models, prices of the mini remain unchanged at $599 and $799. The biggest change: the entry-level model now has a dual-core chip, as the single-core processor model has been discontinued.

But it was the iMac line that Moody wanted to focus on, stressing that while the processor speeds of the Core 2 Duo models are not substantially higher, performance in the new hardware is up dramatically because of internal changes related to the chip architecture. In all but the entry-level model, the Core 2 Duo offers 4MB of level 2 cache memory; In the base model, the processor uses 2MB of level 2 cache.

"This is Intel's latest and greatest dual-core architecture," he said. "It delivers outstanding performance. [With] the new Core 2 Duos, almost all the configs have 4MB of dynamic shared level 2 cache...and they're 64-bit processors. All of it comes together and gives us huge performance. In terms of performance, we ran the industry standard [tests]. Between the previous high-end iMac model and the new highest-end iMac, we saw a 50 percent increase on SPEC [test] and 40 percent on floating point tests."

The new hardware, he said, offers similar performance gains when running applications such as Final Cut Pro, Keynote and iWeb that have been updated to run natively on Intel processors. "Even with things like Safari and iPhoto, not only do you see an increase in benchmarks but in real world [performance]."