Marvin

rsantana said:

I’m sure the same guy who decided to discontinue the original HomePod also had the dreadful idea of killing the 27” iMac.
Please give us back the 27”…! A true flagship computer. I just don’t want to spend $1,500 on an Apple monitor, nor buy an ugly Samsung one…

When you buy a 27" iMac, you are spending around $1300-1500 on an Apple monitor.

You are saying you wouldn't buy:
27" Studio Display $1600 + $600 Mac mini 8GB/256GB = $2200

but you would buy:
27" iMac 8GB/256GB for $2000

wouldn't buy:
27" Studio Display $1600 + $2000 Mac Studio 32GB/512GB = $3600

but would buy:
27" iMac (top spec w 8GB/512GB) $3000 + $600 32GB RAM = $3600

It's the same company making all of these products and they charge similar margins on them, the costs just look different when they are sold separately because you get to see the price distribution between the display part and the computer part.

Apple doesn't manufacture display panels, they buy them from LG and design the enclosure. The same panel in a standalone display will cost Apple the same in an iMac.

No point in waiting 2 years to find out if they will make a bigger iMac when a Studio Display + Mac Studio is available today for the same price.

Rogue01 said:

All we wanted was a 27" 5K iMac with an M Pro or M Max CPU, just like in the MacBook Pros, and the iMac would have been a top seller with customers.

It wouldn't have been a top seller due to price. The entry model would have been M2 with 8GB/256GB for around $2000. To get to M2 Pro, this adds 16GB (+$200), M2 Pro (+$300), 512GB (+$200) = $2700. To go to the base M2 Max, this goes up $900 because it uses 32GB RAM and the top M2 Max is $1100 so now it's $3800 with 512GB SSD.

You can roughly work out what the unit volume is at each price point by knowing that Apple's Mac ASP is ~$1300.

($1000 x U1 + $2000 x U2 + $3000 x U3 + $4000 x U4) / (U1 + U2 + U3 + U4) = $1300

U1 = 0.65, U2 = 0.30, U3 = 0.04, U4 = 0.01

Even with these numbers weighting 95% of units below $3k, it's still above Apple's ASP. This means unit sales above $3k are < 5% and the M2 Pro 27" iMac would start around $2700.

Apple's been in the business a long time and they know what sells and what doesn't. With the Mac Studio, they can sell M2 Max for $2k and hit a larger volume of buyers who already own monitors or buy cheaper ones.

They still sell the Mac Pro at a much higher price point so they could choose to make a 27" iMac but the Mac Pro is due to important customers that have requirements for PCIe cards. There are no essential customers for an M2 Max 27" iMac who wouldn't buy a Macbook Pro or Studio instead.

If people would be prepared to spend $3800 on a 27" iMac, there are deals on M1 Max Macbook Pros that are in the same price range:

https://prices.appleinsider.com/macbook-pro-16-inch-2021
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1668190-REG/apple_mk1a3ll_a_16_2_macbook_pro_with.html
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1694969-REG/apple_mk0u3ll_a_studio_display_standard.html

M1 Max, 32GB/1TB = $2400 + $1449 Studio Display = $3849.

Here's one connected to a 3rd party 34" 4K OLED:

https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-DisplayHDR-FreeSync-Streaming-LS34BG850SNXZA/dp/B0BLF2RWNV/ ($999)



You only really need one USB-C cable to the MBP as it will provide power. One power cable to the display, one to the MBP, everything else can be wireless.

As for the iMac update, it makes sense for the 24" model to get M2 chips before M3 launches in 2024.

AppleInsider said:

"The mini has changed the direction of screen assembly," wrote the leaker (in translation) as spotted by MacRumors, "and the jelly screen phenomenon has been improved."

That change of screen assembly direction does fit with iFixit's supposition that the position of components is exacerbating the issue.

This video says they changed the refresh direction with the mini 6 and the jelly effect is just noticeable because iPads are more often held in portrait when reading:



It doesn't happen in landscape (3:11). By switching it around, it will now happen in landscape like on older iPad minis. Here is an iPad mini 4 with jelly scrolling in landscape:



The proper fixes will be using ProMotion 120Hz with faster refresh or eventually using OLED.

williamh said:

I haven’t upgraded from the Watch 4 yet.   A former Apple Watch wearing friend raves about her Garmin and the body battery feature is intriguing.  

Fitness features are good to focus on. I think Apple would do well to have a smaller fitness band that can be more easily gifted at Christmas. The Apple Watch SE price is reasonable at $249 but some Fitbits are around half this:

https://www.amazon.com/Fitbit-Wellness-Management-Tracking-Graphite/dp/B08ZF7QDXJ

Apple is pretty much saturating the market, this site said they had over 100m active Watch users in 2021 and have the largest marketshare:

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/smartwatch-market-grows-27-yoy-q2-2021-apple-watch-user-base-crosses-100-million/

The fitness bands are very slim and the basic functions are one swipe per screen. Payments, date/time, weather, notifications, timers, heart measures, directions, fitness (steps, calories etc). They can have a reduced set of apps. Things like hotel/car keys etc can work but they'd be too small for messaging using typing except for using Siri dictation. They can be more fashionable than the bulkier models. Might add another 25-50% to their marketshare.

byronl said:

that’s kinda crazy. imagine buying a 50k Mac Pro in 2019 and not be able to develop on it, for a platform the same company makes, just four years later… 

Someone who spends $50k on a Mac Pro for development isn't budgeting properly. That spec of Mac Pro is meant for visual effects work. Most developers use Macbook Pros and likely already upgraded to Apple Silicon because it performs much better.

It also doesn't obsolete the Mac Pro, it just means not being able to build a particular target bundle on it, the code can be written on it and the build made on a $600 Mac mini. That's how a lot of developers work, some even develop using Linux and have a mini compile for Mac.

If someone was making a game in an engine like Unity or Unreal, they can build, run, debug it on the Mac Pro in the engine and just build the Apple Vision Pro target on the mini.