This is basically what I expected and wanted the new iMac to be, instead of those hideous colors and white bezels with the stupid chin.
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Here's a Sneak Peek Inside Apple's New Studio Display
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They could've put an M1 Pro or Max in their fine. I have had zero issues with thermals on my 14" MacBook Pro which has a relatively tiny chassis.
Seems all a bit over-the-top just for a monitor that can follow your face around and has built in speakers that I'd never use and would get **** on by the big speakers connected to my Mac. I guess that's why they priced it too high for me to bother buying. ??♂️
Sort of like the old Front Row functionality of iMac G5 of yore.
Fans, integrated power supply and much larger speakers.
Displays generate heat, too - and this one also contains a fairly beefy 96W (?) power supply in order to power a MacBook Pro - more than your typical display would need. Looks like 3/4 of the boards in there are power supply, which they've probably spaced out "horizontally" to distribute heat.
Heat, again. They'd have needed a M1 Max option to replace the whole range of iMacs - look at the size of the cooler in the Mac Studio.
Also, the M1 Pro - especially the cheaper "binned" version with only 8 CPU cores, that we might have seen in an entry-level 5k iMac, is probably going to be effectively obsolete when the base M2 comes out (with 20%+ faster cores and an extra GU core c.f. the base M1, the 8-core M1 Pro won't have much of a margin) - I wouldn't buy a lower-end M1 Pro machine right now, although the M1 Max should be OK until the M2 Pro/Max (if it's going to come in the same flavours, after the same sort of delay as between the M1 and M1 Pro/Max) appears.
However, I would speculate that the real underlying problem here is the cost of 5k/27" panels.
Since Apple users are the only people interested in 5k, and while economies of scale mean that Apple can use custom panels in MacBook Pros. 5k iMacs sold in significantly lower quantities, so they were buying 27" 5k panels in relatively small quantities => expensive.
If you look at the old entry-level Intel 5k iMacs as roughly equivalent in power to a $1100 Intel i5 Mac Mini, then it felt like you were getting the display (inc. speakers, webcam etc. - not to mention the keyboard and mouse) for well under $1000 - and while I doubt that Apple were taking a loss on those models they probably weren't getting anything like their accustomed markup. If 5k panels are getting more expensive, that could be becoming unaffordable (by Apple standards).
Interestingly, if you look at a top end Intel iMac and specced out a 10 core i9, with 32GB RAM and the better GPU, you ended up spending $3800 which was more than a M1 Max Mac Studio and Studio Display costs today... So its as if the higher-end iMac options were subsidising the high-end display in the base level iMac.
ISTR Apple dropped A-series support from MacOS like hot garbage the moment the M1 came out, there were always features missing (such as virtualisation and some Rosetta accelerations), and developers only got a few months of useful life out of the DTK (which was all it was ever intended for - a few weeks head start in building ARM versions of Apps so there was a critical mass when the M1 launched).
I've heard of people having flown with planes and zeppelins, and even carpets, but monitors, this must be a Gen Y thing?
Hmmm... At some point does the Studio Display become obsolete because iOS no longer supports the A13? That would be a shame.
Wow, yeah, it definitely seems like this chassis is intended to lead some double-life in future.
What if it was supposed to be an 27“ iMac with an m1 max, but then something went wrong, so apple used the a13 instead?
So basically they could make the PSU external, take the A13 out and replace it with a M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max and sell this thing as iMac 27" with a starting price of 1799 just as they used to.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I suspect Apple will sell significantly fewer units of the Studio Display than they historically sold of the 27" iMac.
It will continue to work fine.
> It will continue to work fine.
Yes, like all Internet-connected consumer electronics continue to "work fine" years down the road.
what a waste. apple should've put some more functionality into the monitor beyond center stage and hye siri support. what a joke.
One of the big questions would be whether it has a Wi-Fi/BT chip in it. If it doesn't it, I can't see it having much a future 'double life'.
The Studio Display isn't an "internet-connected consumer electronics" device in the that sense. It uses iOS to run its functions, but it's not streaming Apple TV+ or uploading photos or surfing the net or anything of that sort. It's just a frickin' monitor.