I think Apple does care but their marketing data shows that it's a tough sell to sell an $1299 iMac 24" 4.5K M4 beside a $1799 iMac 27" 5K M4. For $500 extra you get the same M4 16GB 256GB found in the newer 24" 4.5K display that came out in 2021 but using the same 27" 5K display from an iMac that 1st came out in 2014?
Difficult to market.
I'd buy it with caveats wondering.... why is this 27" 5K iMac still at the old price without physical size display tech improvements? Shouldn't it be cheaper given it's tech over a decade old?
I don’t think you can argue Apple cares about a user group and then also say “but the marketing data doesn’t support it” — if the decisions are led by the marketing data (and I’m pretty sure the 27” iMac always outsold the smaller models, and by a large margin — but that doesn’t mean the iMac sold “enough”), then that stands to reason that Apple doesn’t care. The bottom line is this: Apple chose to exit a market segment (larger screen AIOs) entirely and focus the iMac, which had been popular with creative professionals at the 27” size (but clearly not popular enough) on being an overpriced kitchen computer or a computer a startup or doctors office gets for its receptionist.
As an iMac lover, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that Apple doesn’t want to make an AIO for me, a person who reliably spent at least $3500 on an iMac every 3 years ($4300 for my 2020 iMac, even), and would rather I spend $4500+ on a laptop and another $1600 on a display or $4000 on a Mac Studio and plus an ASD. (Granted, the ASD could be a once a decade purchase as opposed to 3 iMacs a decade, so the math still sucks but it sucks less when amortized that way). Maybe one day that changes and we see a 32” iMac, but I know it won’t be cheap.
Beyond that, I think it's cute Apple has often kept the historical lens of selling a $1299 iMac, but let’s not pretend that they had to have a $1299 iMac in the lineup. They could have very easily just had a 27” lineup and that for $2299 or something (so a small enough price premium over an ASD to make it a compelling upgrade option to someone who might just be after the monitor or just Mac mini and more generic monitor - similar to how the 2.5K 27” iMac started at $700 more than the equivalent Apple Cinema Display/Apple Thunderbolt Display ). The fact that they didn’t goes to my argument that Apple doesn’t care about the creative professional/prosumer AIO market.
And that’s annoying, but there just aren’t enough of us for them to care about and margins on the overpriced kitchen computers are just too high.
I'm sure 6K & 8K displays will become the norm in the coming 10 years
I think 8K displays will be the norm within 5 years. They will perfectly slot into the 4K spot. As I’ve said in many of these threads, I sadly don’t think 6K (or 5K) ever becomes the norm. It’s too niche when most Mac owners don’t care or even understand that 4K looks like garbage on macOS and Windows (and embarrassingly, even Linux) handles fractional scaling so well so that text can remain crisp but UX elements not too big or too small.
PPI is relevant as it relates to macOS support. Does macOS handle 275 ppi the same way it deals with 218 ppi or will we suffer scaling likek 4K resolution at larger than 21.5" displays?
To paint macOS user inference elements at the right “sizes” there would be non-integer scaling like what we saw on the 21.5 iMac, the MBA and other machines. That said, text would look great.
But if touch screen Macs are coming (and I have to think they are — there is no other justification for for the padding horrors of macOS Tahoe), then I hope we will get 3X scaling like on iOS. And 3X scaling would let you have a lot more options for screen sizes that wouldn’t put the sweet spot for an 8K macOS display at 40”+.
Of course, just because it’s an 8K display doesn't mean it would have to be run at 8K. There’s an argument to be made that you could just run an 8K display at 6K in macOS. It would be a big waste of money until the display prices get cheap enough, but plenty of people run 4K displays at 1440p for higher frame rates in games, and proper integer scaling on macOS strikes me as just as valid a reason.
And in five years, I expect there will be countless 32” 8K monitors out there but prob still only a few 6K panels.
None of those made it to market, even in a limited way, as far as I could tell. The ASUS is up on their site with a price, and the User Manual is available, but really, until B&H stocks it, you could still be right.
Yeah, that’s why I said “meaningful” as I think this 8K will get closer than previous ones (in that you might be able fo buy it, even if just in Asia), but even if B&H/CDW ever gets a listing, I’m not convinced it will be a readily available thing for this model (even at $8800, I think B&H would sell a lot of them, or enough to stock it anyway; I’m less sure of Asus's ability to manufacturer it at higher volumes since it isn't Dell or LG when it comes to higher-end monitors).
My CES prediction is that we will see a number of other 8K monitors this year, but I don’t have any sense of what that will mean for this ProArt. It’s definitely happened before where a newer model announced a year later winds up coming to market in a meaningful way sooner than the previous year's model. But it’s also been the case that it takes over a year for a product to come out at low volumes.
I mean, weren’t the PE0 Acer's that still aren’t available anywhere outside Singapore first announced in 2024 or did I dream that? I could’ve sworn the 5K was announced at least a year earlier, but I could be gaslighting myself.
