It has been a while...

Sorry for the 11 year absence, I've been busy: - Getting some A levels - Getting a degree - Doing even more exams to be an Actuary - Getting a bit ill Given the number of fans I have on here, I thought I'd get back into the blogging "sphere". At some point I might make some waffley posts about the last 11 years of apple products, what I've enjoyed, what I haven't enjoyed, and everything inbetween. Right now though lets talk about something close to my heart - the lack of a prosumer iMac. The Mac Studio is a great product. So is the new Studio Display. As a long time 5k imac user (2014, fully specced), I should be overjoyed with the prospect of a Mac Studio/Studio Display combo. The computer itself is a huge upgrade in pretty much every way you could imagine. The CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD are blow my imac out of the water, pretty significantly. The display is also pretty good, its 600 nits vs my imacs 350 nits, and the colour gamut is a step up. However, this is where the problems begin... My 2014 iMac started at $2,499. This was an uNbElIeVaBlE deal, and it was in line with apple's startegy for the iMac. They'd done the same thing in 2009 with 1440p screens - people were only just starting to talk about 1080p, and "full HD" monitors cost silly money. Apple brought out a (then huge) 27 inch screen with 1440p resolution, and managed to keep the price pretty sensible (I believe they started around £1,500. That was a great deal. Similarly in 2014, people were only just starting to talk about 4k monitors, and the cheapest, worst 4k monitor you could get was well over £1k. Making a 5k resolution panel, which had great colours/contrast, and bundling it with a really tidy computer, great accessories, and a metal all in one design for $2,499, was again, ridiculously good value. It's now 2022, almost 8 years since I bought my iMac. If you're being generous, you'd have to say that the apple pricetag on that 5k monitor was around $1,499, with the other thousand making up the computer, enclosure, accessories. The studio display, in many ways, is a spec bump of my iMac screen from 8 years ago, for the reasons above. In fact, the screens in the iMac since the 2017 WWDC refresh have been almost on par with the Studio Display's specs, and those iMac's have consistly started at around £1,699. As a reminder, that included a fast computer, and £200 worth of accessories. The Studio Display starts at £1,500. Once you add a keyboard and mouse, it's £1,700. Hopefully you can now see where I got the energy (and anger) to write this post, while ill with COVID again. £1,700 is an absolute kick in the face to 27 inch iMac users that were looking to upgrade. Not only have they discontinued the 27 inch iMac, they've removed the computer, the accessories, and offered it us for the same price. The "cheapest" way to get a 27 inch apple computer is now to buy a mac mini (£700), keyboard and mouse (£200) and Studio Display (£1500), which sums to £2400. For this you're getting an A14X (yeah i'm cool I understand apple silicon), 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD. This also loses the All in One (AIO) design, which I think is a big downgrade. In terms of snappiness and quiteness, I have no doubt that an M1/A14X will stack up okay compared to the old base 27 inch iMac. I can't remember exact numbers, but they were in the same sort of ballpark once you averaged CPU/GPU performance. So my question is, where is the upgrade for 27 inch imac users? Every other apple silicon Mac has maintained its price (give or take £100 either way) and has got a HUGE leap in performance from the old intel models. I think the best way for apple to profit from the new silicon is by going aggressive with the price (thanks to not having to buy intel chips) and really trying to push up the market share of the Mac. It seems more and more like apple are abandoning the middleground/prsoumer and pushing back into clearly defined consumer (bright colours, M1 chips) and pro (boring colours, crazy fast chips, expensive). As someone in that middleground, I find this frustrating. My only real choice for an upgrade to my 2014 imac is a Studio Display (not a huge upgrade over my screen, £1,500), a Mac Studio (£2,200 with the 1TB SSD) and accesories (keyboard and trackpad, £250). This means I have to spend £3,950 to upgrade my iMac to something that is fundamentally better than my 2014 spec, and the main thing I actually want to upgrade is the screen, which is barely any different. My second big gripe with the current lineup is the lack of a mini-LED external monitor (that doesn't cost $6,000). But maybe that's a post for another day... but it links back to all of the above. The old apple strategy on Macs would have had a 27 inch, mini LED iMac, with M1 Pro/Max/(Ultra?) - which would have been a fantastic upgrade over my 2014 model. Even if the mini-LED drove the cost up to a $2,999 starting price ($500 more than the 16 inch MBP with identical specs, so not unreasonable at all) I think this would be a really appealing machine prior 27 inch iMac users. I'll keep dreaming...