Dare I hope, with the word "performance," that we'll get at least a glimpse of what's coming at the high end? Really hoping we'll get a clearer vision of Big iMac, even if it won't be shipping for a few months.
Peek Performance: March 8th Event [Event discussion begins on p6!]
- Thread starter Mhorydyn
- Start date
- Status
If the current rumor consensus is to be believed, seems likely. A Mac mini with specs everyone can predict from the 2021 MBPs, an iPad Air, an iPhone SE, and some services time-fillers do not add up to an event that makes anyone happy.
This is Actually xMac. On the one hand, that fits well with the surrealist, apocalyptic feeling generated by current world events. But on the other hand the rumor as it's been brought to us seems, well, rather believable from the Apple that brought us ugly-looking, heavy, but exceedingly capable MBPs and the 2019 Tank Pro. And it would explain the event theme, and provide some meat that would justify an event at all.
If it can drive 3 5K displays I will be seriously intrigued and might even trade my workhorse iMac Pro in for it.
Late edit for one more thought: I wouldn't be shocked, now, to see a fairly major Mac reveal at this event, including both Mac Studio and Big iMac, even if one or both won't ship for a while. I think Apple will want to clear the decks for AR at WWDC and won't want to spend any time there on Mac hardware. And I expect the Mac Studio and Big iMac will have essentially the same guts, and 2x M1 Max will be quite a story. So introduce all the pro Mac hardware short of the Mac Pro now, even if it's not going on sale until early summer.
If it can drive 3 5K displays I will be seriously intrigued and might even trade my workhorse iMac Pro in for it.
Late edit for one more thought: I wouldn't be shocked, now, to see a fairly major Mac reveal at this event, including both Mac Studio and Big iMac, even if one or both won't ship for a while. I think Apple will want to clear the decks for AR at WWDC and won't want to spend any time there on Mac hardware. And I expect the Mac Studio and Big iMac will have essentially the same guts, and 2x M1 Max will be quite a story. So introduce all the pro Mac hardware short of the Mac Pro now, even if it's not going on sale until early summer.
I don't think there was ever a time when the rumor consensus was "no Macs," but for quite a while it was "just a M1 Pro/Max Mac mini." The other products are a new iPhone SE and a new iPad Air, both in existing form factors, and an event with just those three things would be very underwhelming.
But now we have this Mac Studio rumor, and it could also result in a Studio Display and an early Big iMac introduction. Jade is right to say that all of those are small-volume products, but they're high-glamor and they're also important to a vocal and visible audience.
THe very name "Mac Studio" suggests a solution to the big problem with xMac: how does Apple add enough value to justify their margin? The name suggests they do it by leaning into a niche of professionals who don't need Mac Pro horsepower but do use their Macs to make money and do have certain needs (top-notch displays, good input methods) that Apple handles pretty well. The stagnation in the prosumer display space has left more room for Apple to devise a value-added product.
These are low-volume products and I don't know that the supply chain rumor mill will be as accurate for them as it is for a product like a MBP or iPad where Apple has to plan for millions of units. Nobody in the rumor chain got either the 2017 iMac Pro or the 2019 Mac Pro quite right, and the rumors have been hit-or-miss about the details of recent iMac generations too. I wouldn't take predictions as gospel on either substance or timing.
If Apple is introducing these products now, I think they will be available in at least low volume no later than the summer, and the reason for introducing now would be (1) to put the things they can build now, such as a vanilla M1 Pro configuration of a Mac Studio, on sale and (2) to keep the faith among pros in the way they did not in 2016 and 2017. We're watching a different Apple approach to pro market segments over the last couple years and this could be part of it.
I am an extremely satisfied iMac Pro owner, so I may be biased, but I'll just chime in to say that there are plenty of "pro" workflows for which an iMac Pro is more than sufficient. The big-dog Mac Pro is necessary where hardware expansion and multi-GPU computing are necessary. But I'd be very interested to see sales figures of the Mac Pro and iMac Pro next to each other. They are both small but circumstantial evidence including the secondhand market suggests to me that the iMac Pro was the better seller. The ephiphany may not have been "every pro needs a 1500 W tower" but "there are multiple kinds of pro workflows and we've only designed for one."
The iMac had been steadily moving upmarket even when the old cheesegraters were still on sale, and continued to do so throughout the trashcan era. Eventually that bumped up against the thermal limitations of the existing 27" case, and the iMac Pro was a neat if expensive solution to the problem. Some people and some employers (for whom an AIO is often very easy to deploy) really did want a high-end AIO. That's why I think we'll have a Big iMac even if everything about the Mac Studio rumor is true.
I think you're conflating a few things here.
First, routers and displays are a red herring. Apple stopped selling routers because it didn't want to spend its focus engineering a mesh product and mesh was taking over. (And its value add was shrinking--other makers' products became steadily more stable and reliable.) Apple stopped selling displays because it had no way to add the value needed to maintain its margins, something that is likely changing as the consumer monitor market has stagnated for five years and Apple has developed more ability to source custom components.
Second, within the Mac lineup, the notebook and desktop pictures were different. Ive got the notebooks mostly right, as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as everyone will subject me to for that statement. He just overshot a bit on thinness and didn't manage to execute on the butterfly keyboard. The 2021 MBP doesn't look like a 2008 or 2011 MBP redux. It looks like a 2016 MBP that had a slight course correction and was hit by an ugly stick. The market, including the pro market, really did move away from the desktop replacement and toward thin-and-light with battery life prioritized over all-out performance, even at the pro end. He got the trend right but the details wrong.
The desktop is where Ive really screwed up, and I have some sympathy there. The fact that in this era of unprecedented performance per watt the high-end desktop space is moving quickly toward workstations that require a 20A outlet is batshit insane. I wouldn't have designed for it either, in either 2012 or 2016. It's purely an artifact of both Intel and NVIDIA being pushed into corners as a result of their own choices, and it's resulting in some wacky products in the workstation market.
Apple capitulated to it with the 2019 Mac Pro. But Apple also made clear through both pricing and component choices that it thought such a product would be appealing only to a small audience, and that the bulk of professionals buying Macs would find other products more to their liking. The 2021 MBP, as much as I make fun of its looks, is an astonishingly capable pro computer that is cheaper, much easier to deploy, and in many ways more refined than the Mac Pro. We are in an iMac interregnum but the same could have been said of both the 2017 iMac Pro and the 2020 27" iMac when they came out. And the same will be true of the Mac Studio. The high end of the desktop market is a place where Apple has judged it necessary to play, but Apple is also making clear that it thinks the buyers who don't really really need to be there should be elsewhere.
Lossless compression wouldn't hurt the picture quality but wireless video would be entirely orthogonal to the monitor's ability to serve as a dock with single-cable connection, which is one of the main attractions of modern monitors.
This is nothing new, but for the record:
- The audience of high-end PC gamers could not be a worse fit for Apple. The things they value are literally the exact opposite of what Apple does well. Apple has no way to add value for them and command margins from them.
- iOS is the biggest casual gaming platform in the world, and in terms of economic impact in gaming the iPhone SE that will be introduced tomorrow is more important than any high-end gaming PC that will be introduced this year.
- Apple Arcade is a bid to bring that success to Apple's other platforms, and Apple Silicon in Macs will make it much easier to develop for Apple Arcade and raise the minimum performance bar at the same time.
- The audience of high-end PC gamers could not be a worse fit for Apple. The things they value are literally the exact opposite of what Apple does well. Apple has no way to add value for them and command margins from them.
- iOS is the biggest casual gaming platform in the world, and in terms of economic impact in gaming the iPhone SE that will be introduced tomorrow is more important than any high-end gaming PC that will be introduced this year.
- Apple Arcade is a bid to bring that success to Apple's other platforms, and Apple Silicon in Macs will make it much easier to develop for Apple Arcade and raise the minimum performance bar at the same time.
It's a Iici! It's a NeXTStation! It's a Cube! It's the Trash Pro! It's... xMac!
This wouldn't have been possible without AS. The nature of performant PC GPUs meant that any Mac desktop would either be much bigger or much weaker than the still-fervent vision of Steve Jobs would suggest. Now the AS GPU will allow them to take another crack at it.
This wouldn't have been possible without AS. The nature of performant PC GPUs meant that any Mac desktop would either be much bigger or much weaker than the still-fervent vision of Steve Jobs would suggest. Now the AS GPU will allow them to take another crack at it.
If the thing has 2x M1 Max, these "integrated graphics" will be more powerful than all but a handful of high-end desktop GPUs.
I'd bet a M1 Mac mini that Apple never makes a Mac with space for internal spinning rust again. Even for the massive Mac Pro they set aside physical cubic inches for spinning rust but outsourced the necessary parts to a third party.
The M1 Pro has roughly twice the graphics power of the plain M1, and the M1 Max either roughly three or roughly four times the graphics power. A doubled M1 Max would have roughly eight times the graphics power of the M1. Not every workload is about single-threaded CPU performance.
A 2X M1 Max would be roughly on par with the 6900XT—a rare and expensive part which even most high-end desktops don't have at this point—in those same benchmarks. Your black-and-white idea that "integrated can't compete" needs some re-examination.
It's actually the return of the full-size HomePod, with "monitor" instead of "speaker" having been the result of mishearing scratchy Chinese over a VHF radio link.
M1 iPad Air makes no sense to me whatsoever. We have an A14 iPad Air in the house and I think I could pick ten other things I'd improve about it before multicore CPU performance (the A15 matches the M1 in single-core). Even my M1 iPad Pro is all ate up with motor and could use other things before more CPU. Make it make sense, Tim.
Your argument is based on your perception of value. Apple has mostly held the line on pricing with Apple Silicon machines, or retreated slightly (As you state, the $100 price drop on the baseline Mac Mini is actually pretty substantial, as a percentage) while offering "more."
That's... fine, if the "more" is of value to you. I'm pining (hopelessly) for the Mac equivalent of the base level iPad, with corners cut accordingly. I want to see Apple give up most of its margin on at least one Mac because it now controls the entire widget, and because we know it can. Apple so far is unwilling to do that, substantively, with any Mac (M1 Mac Mini as a possible exception). Which obviously is fine, but again—I don't buy into "spend more to get more!" at all, whether we're talking about computers or monitors or anything else Apple sells or might sell. The "more" is not an automatic benefit to me, and I bristle at Apple trying to tell me it should matter through marketing ("performance per watt").
What triggered me is how discussions of Apple's rumored monitor continued to throw more and more functionality, more gizmos, more "magical and amazing" onto the pile. Why not just make a well-constructed, high-quality, fairly priced monitor? Apple struggles with this idea.
Whether or not that means Apple is "soaking" people who buy into the "pro" conceit is, I suppose, a matter of perception and how irritating you're trying to be on an internet message board. Jade may be an eloquent irritant, but he's our eloquent irritant.
I don't believe Apple is giving up margin at all on the base iPad. It found a way to build a "good enough" iPad for next to nothing, mostly by using previous generations of parts. That may become more possible with the Mac as we get into multiple generations of Mac SOCs, if Apple is willing to retreat to base-iPad levels of screen quality (which are likely acceptable if the price is low enough) on a Mac.
Going to buy the Studio Display. Not sure yet what computer I'll connect it to, but I'm sick of the constant misbehavior of my old HP z27q, and it's also turning colors at the edges.
Also disappointed it can't do 120 Hz, at least not with existing computers, but nothing I have could drive that in any event.
Also disappointed it can't do 120 Hz, at least not with existing computers, but nothing I have could drive that in any event.
Killing the 27" iMac immediately and giving the Mac Studio such a wide price spread is really making me wonder whether there will be a Big iMac at all.
I would rather have a M1 Max Big iMac with ProMotion and MiniLED than a Mac Studio connected to a 60 Hz Studio Display. I don't need the M1 Ultra or 128 GB RAM, but I'd benefit from the nicer display every day.
If I were confident that Big iMac were coming, I'd wait for it. But if it's not, I should just put in the order today for a M1 Max/32C/64 GB Mac Studio. (Or possibly a similarly configured 16" MBP.)
I would rather have a M1 Max Big iMac with ProMotion and MiniLED than a Mac Studio connected to a 60 Hz Studio Display. I don't need the M1 Ultra or 128 GB RAM, but I'd benefit from the nicer display every day.
If I were confident that Big iMac were coming, I'd wait for it. But if it's not, I should just put in the order today for a M1 Max/32C/64 GB Mac Studio. (Or possibly a similarly configured 16" MBP.)
I'm starting to think the way forward for me is to replace both my MBP and my iMac Pro with a tricked-out 16" MBP. I don't see that the Mac Studio adds a lot of value for my use case compared with the MBP, and that way I also get AS when I'm not at my desk. The convenience of having separate portable and desktop machines is nice but not worth the backbreaking cost of upgrading both machines, especially given that the specs in my desired configurations are pretty much the same and all reports are that this MBP stays quiet under moderate load.
Upgrade paths are dead in the new world of total system integration. The only one that even makes sense at a theoretical level is for GPUs, but GPU cards are presently all but unobtainable if you're not an OEM. RAM is now on the package. I suppose Apple could have chosen to go with replaceable NVMe SSD modules for storage without a major performance penalty, but there's not much benefit for Apple in exchange for the increased probability of failure.
Upgrade paths are dead in the new world of total system integration. The only one that even makes sense at a theoretical level is for GPUs, but GPU cards are presently all but unobtainable if you're not an OEM. RAM is now on the package. I suppose Apple could have chosen to go with replaceable NVMe SSD modules for storage without a major performance penalty, but there's not much benefit for Apple in exchange for the increased probability of failure.
After having had a day to process this, a few things are sticking in my craw.
At this point I feel more confused than anything else, and like I still need more information to decide what my strategy will be to replace my two Intel Macs.
- Why aren't the Studio Display specs better? $1599 is not "pro display" territory but it is at the very high end for consumer displays. But this looks like the exact same panel that was in the last 27" iMac, which only cost a bit more for the whole computer, and which was good but hardly industry-leading. At 5K resolution, 120 Hz would be possible through a TB3/TB4 connection, but we get the same old 60 Hz. The backlight is still the same old single-zone LED, meaning that there is no HDR capability and the same brightness and contrast specs as before. Instead, it feels like all the effort went into the non-display systems. The camera appears to be the best available in any display on the market and the speaker system looks like a beefed-up version of the pioneering one in the 24" iMac. For all this effort, we're still in a situation where the display on a 14" MBP or a 12.9" iPad Pro shows better pictures and video than Apple's big beautiful creative-professional tool.
- Why aren't the SSDs with M1 Ultra faster? The claims for Mac Studio SSD performance are the same as those for MBP SSD performance, so I assume they are using the same controller and SSD components. 6 GB+/s is nothing to sneeze at, although high-end PC parts compare to it. But the M1 Ultra has double the I/O bandwidth and seems like it ought to be able to do better. The CPU and GPU performance claims for the M1 Ultra are industry-leading, but is there any reason they can't be accompanied by industry-leading disk I/O? Maybe we have to wait for Mac Pro for that.
- Where's the mid-priced solution? A fully loaded 24" iMac, with 16GB/1TB/10GbE, is $1929. The most basic configuration of Mac Studio + Studio Display is $3598, and has three times the GPU, twice the SSD speed, and twice the RAM. That's an absolutely monstrous empty space from a company that's usually very good at finding something for every price point. What will fill that space? A M1 Pro Mac mini? The Big iMac that Gurman still thinks is coming, even though I thought Temus was pretty unambiguous that the Mac Pro was the only one left? Or does Apple just expect people in the middle to buy MBPs?
At this point I feel more confused than anything else, and like I still need more information to decide what my strategy will be to replace my two Intel Macs.
Put another way: "You can't do better from the other guys, so we'll put in minimum effort." As a display I don't see how this is better than the 2019 version of the Ultrafine 5K, which I could pick up tomorrow at my local Apple Store for $300 less. The Ultrafine 5K integrates just as weill with macOS and has the same connectivity options. And the Spyder measures its real-world maximum brightness, at least the example on my desk, at 589 nits. If I'm going to have a three-display setup, only the one in the middle needs the industry-leading camera and speakers. The ones on the side could be the Ultrafine 5K with no loss of anything.
It's actually making me think that instead of ordering a Studio Display like I initially thought I would, I should pick up another UF5K tomorrow to replace my left monitor (a color-distorted and increasingly flaky 2015 HP Z27q) and wait on anything further until we know for sure whether Big iMac is dead or just on vacation. If there's no Big iMac then I can pick up a Studio Display later to fill the middle spot vacated by my existing Big iMac.
Big intentional price gaps are not typical of Apple's strategy. Maybe there's something to it as a short-term strategy to try to capture a few people in the excitement of Real xMac and upsell them to the $3600 price point, but I can't imagine this is the permanent vision for the desktop lineup.
Neither is anything to write home about, but the Ultrafine 5K does have both a 1080p cam and built-in stereo speakers. But if you are using the mic and speakers I think the extra for the Studio Display is probably worth it.
There are basically none. The LG 24UD58-B (24" 4K) is probably the best solution and it seems to be out of stock everywhere at the moment, although not formally discontinued. There's also the LG UltraFine 4K, which adds Mac-specific docking like the 5K but costs twice as much for the same panel as the UD58.
The mass market has standardized around 27" 4K at 163 dpi.
I'd feel the same about an M1 Max (for 3 displays and 64 GB RAM) at $3000.
Also after sleeping on it… I’m going to end up very confused if the ample supply of fairly specific Big iMac rumors we got over the last few months just crumbles into dust. We heard 27”; summer release; similar design to the 24” but in pro colors; MiniLED and ProMotion for the display; and M1 Pro/Max for the SOC. The fancy camera module in the Studio Display would also look awfully nice atop a Big iMac.
So I think I’m going to wait and hope that Gurman is right and that Johnny either misspoke or was relying on the fact that the 2017 iMac Pro is no longer in the lineup.
So I think I’m going to wait and hope that Gurman is right and that Johnny either misspoke or was relying on the fact that the 2017 iMac Pro is no longer in the lineup.
If you compare Stevenotes with today's presentations, what immediately jumps out at you is the bluntness and candor. Steve wasn't afraid to offend anyone, while Tim Cook's Apple very much wants to ensure that everyone feels heard and nobody feels offended. Steve often took that trait of his way too far, but Tim has moved too far in the other direction, to the point where little of real interest gets said in Apple's public statements.
You can also see this in the approach to shareholders and analysts. Steve had Apple do what he wanted to do and the shareholders and analysts were just along for the ride. Tim's Apple is a much more conventional publicly traded company in that it tries assiduously to maximize shareholder return and avoid surprising the analysts, and that has been fabulously effective from a business perspective. But just once I'd like to see Tim tell an analyst or activist investor to go to hell.
1 1/2 days later and the main effect of the Studio Display reveal on me has been that I'm trolling eBay for deals on demo or A-condition Ultrafine 5Ks. Everything about the Studio Display that is NOT the panel itself is better than the Ultrafine 5K, but it appears from the presentation and the tech specs Apple is publishing that the panel itself is near-identical. And in my setup what I need is the panel itself. If LED-backlit, non-HDR, P3, 600-nit, 60 Hz 5K panels are what we get for the next few years, might as well find a good deal on one.
And now Gruber is piling on:
I just don't get how anyone can possibly think that a $3598 product is a drop-in replacement for a $1799 one. Or even for a midrange iMac config in the $2500-$3000 range.
Gruber":msq7ld0w said:
I just don't get how anyone can possibly think that a $3598 product is a drop-in replacement for a $1799 one. Or even for a midrange iMac config in the $2500-$3000 range.
Yeah, there's a big gap. If you don't need workstation power but you want an Apple-quality display and 32 GB RAM, you're out of luck. And I expect that describes a reasonable number of people. The secondhand market suggests that at least two-thirds of 27" iMac sales were base to midrange configs that were considerably less expensive to buy than a Studio + Studio Display. Some of those will do OK with a M1 mini + Studio Display but others will find it limiting, particularly with respect to RAM and dual-display capability..
I'm in a different boat: I'm willing to pay around the price for a M1 Max Mac Studio + Studio Display, but I feel disappointed that for all that money I wouldn't get a better display than I already have in my existing 2017 iMac Pro. The iMac Pro had meaningful spec upgrades to the display over the 2015 iMac 5K it replaced, but now it's several years later and there's no progress.
I'm in a different boat: I'm willing to pay around the price for a M1 Max Mac Studio + Studio Display, but I feel disappointed that for all that money I wouldn't get a better display than I already have in my existing 2017 iMac Pro. The iMac Pro had meaningful spec upgrades to the display over the 2015 iMac 5K it replaced, but now it's several years later and there's no progress.
I also will wait for first-party reports on the ASD, but the LG UltraFine 5K behaves absolutely perfectly in this respect, and I'm sure there's some Apple special sauce behind that that I'd guess will be in the ASD as well. It's the first monitor I've had that behaves 100% flawlessly since my 23" ACD back in the day.
When you're using a display that Apple considers "retina," neither Apple's method nor SwitchResX actually changes what the display sees. The scaling happens on the Mac end and the display always sees a 5120x2880 signal. I'd be very surprised if the ASD worked any differently.
LATE EDIT: The stricken section may not be correct. It depends on whether the ASD can accept a compressed DisplayPort stream. See below.
"6K" really means the Apple Pro Display XDR. It uses a single losslessly compressed (DSC) DisplayPort stream when in 6K mode. The 5K displays on the market pre-ASD use two uncompressed DisplayPort streams (MST), either muxed into a single TB3/4 signal (LG UltraFine 5K) or sent through two physical DisplayPort cables (all the third-party 5K displays). You only get a maximum of two DisplayPort streams per TB bus. We ran into this with the 2020 Intel iMac equipped with a 5700XT, which can drive two XDRs in addition to its own internal display but only one LG UltraFine 5K. It will also affect the TS4. The question is which technology the ASD will use. We know it can speak MST because Macs that can't speak DSC, such as the 2017 iMac Pro, can drive it. The question is whether there is a DSC mode for DSC-capable Macs. If so, the TS4 will be able to drive two ASDs when connected to such a Mac, although there may not be much bandwidth left for anything else. If not, you'll be limited to one.
I think eventually Apple will have to drop the perfect price correspondence in all AS product lines. That would just result in too much padding in the prices of the high-end stuff. I agree we probably won't get a M1 Pro mini (if we were going to, we would have seen it Tuesday) but I think they will find a way to make the pricing work on some kind of intermediate product in the future. Whether M2 will have enough RAM, expansion, and GPU power to support that product or whether it will need to be M2 Pro… who knows.
I suspect the price of the Ultra is set based on production constraints. It can't have terrific yields at this point.
By contrast a Max at $1999 seems like a statement that they have a lot of confidence in Max production by now.
By contrast a Max at $1999 seems like a statement that they have a lot of confidence in Max production by now.
Received my (second) LG UltraFine 5K today, which I bought for 60% of the price of an ASD (it was barely used—built in 12/2021 and the original owner bought last month), and I'm enjoying the identical picture and the new, shiny plug-'n'-play experience.
(In all seriousness, I also did see an ASD hooked to a base Mac Studio in the Apple Store yesterday, and within the constraints of the fairly bright environment the picture did look the same as the LG, as the specs would suggest.)
(In all seriousness, I also did see an ASD hooked to a base Mac Studio in the Apple Store yesterday, and within the constraints of the fairly bright environment the picture did look the same as the LG, as the specs would suggest.)
Not making the M1 Ultra version of the Studio Space Gray, following the practice set by the 27" iMac and iMac Pro, seems like a missed opportunity.
Of course it would need to wait for the maybe-rumored-maybe-not ProMotion/MiniLED Studio Display, which would need to be Space Gray as well.
- Status