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Will There Be An Apple Event in October?
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When did they promise that? Don’t most people whine about having too many incremental updates instead of whining there is not enough?
I dont see Apple chasing higher margins, what I do see is Apple trying to maintain it's current margins in the face of increasing inflation. As the pricing of it's products is likely set at the limit that the general public will bear. Any price hike especially on the base models could tilt Mac sales further downwards.
I would hazard a guess that the Studio is a result of being a cheaper option to a new 27"/32" AIO. As the customer can now pick and choose their own peripheral's at a far lower price point than Apple's. TBH many would be just as well served by the Mac Mini as it's far more competent than it's Intel based predecessor's.
As ever Apple remains to have egregious pricing on it's inhouse upgrades as they know if you need the upgrade you have no other alternative barring external storage. One member did post an interesting supposition that potentially Apple offsets the pricing of the base model Mac's via the upgrade pricing as in general the base model Mac's do represent reasonable value.
Apple still has room to manouver as those in CONUS can find some very decent deals on some SKU's in the likes of Best By & Costco so someone is eating the cost. Rest of the world generally is stuck with RRP and that I think is Apple's concern as that's the growth area for the Mac...
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When? When they introduced their own line of CPUs. They said that the reasons for introduction were performance gains and that don't have to wait for Intel's release plan but do it on their own terms. It is true though they didn't mention that their own terms could include being even slower with releases than Intel iMacs.
There is no way Studio is cheaper option to 27" AIO if the cost of display only is is $1599 and base model of Mac Studio is $1999. The last base model of 27" iMac cost $1799 with identical display. Albeit Mac Studio is specced higher, not everyone needs that. Even if we count basic Mac Mini model at $799 + display at $1599 I doubt that entry level model of 27" AIO would cost $2399 in today's prices.
They'll do an iPad mini refresh with a17
And maybe an air refresh with m2, but the iPad Air is kinda awkwardly positioned... it's for people like me who wanted 256 GB of storage and M1 without paying for a pro (because I don't care about cameras).... maybe apple will kill it. Or maybe they'll just leave it running on m1... and drop price?
And maybe an air refresh with m2, but the iPad Air is kinda awkwardly positioned... it's for people like me who wanted 256 GB of storage and M1 without paying for a pro (because I don't care about cameras).... maybe apple will kill it. Or maybe they'll just leave it running on m1... and drop price?
Apple has painted itself into a comer; if they launch a cheaper similar base model Studio spec 27" iMac it will eat into Studio & Studio Display sales. Pricing I would expect starting at around $3K if not more. Simply wont happen as even that undercuts the Studio and Apple's own display, also factor in mouse & keyboard.
If Apple releases a scaled up 24" iMac they will likely get slammed for it just being that with no significant improvement other than M2. A 5K (5120-by-2880) 27" would need to have the M2 Pro SOC or it will have lesser graphical performance than the 4.5K (4480-by-2520) 24" and so the price escalates again to say around $2.5K...
As said if you dont need the performance of the Studio there is the Mac Mini at considerably less cost and you choose your own peripheral's be them Apple or third party. Ultimately if the demand for a 27" iMac was strong Apple would be chasing it. Right now Apple is either saving such a product for a "rainy day" or currently has no interest due to demand/price ratio.
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The story here is the same as it has been...the laptops start bigger than needed and they trim the size and weight over time as technology improves. It will continue....as the chips increase in efficiency and speed, the size of battery will decrease and they will become lighter. Considering the previous designs of the MacBook and MBA, it would not say industrial engineering is at the peak of its heyday; thus, there are many improvements to make in respect to weight and thickness/size. I'm just hoping to see some sleeker designs and lighter machines. Dropping the MBA from 2.8 to 2.7 lbs isn't groundbreaking to say the least, but after butterfly gate I think their aim is stability and pushing volume; however, that platform cannot exist forever!
Why do you need a fan? And one is presumed to use WiFi for an internet connection, hence no stock Ethernet.
Sure, it's bare bones, but what is wrong with offering a bare bones item? Manufacturers often do this.
But that's the thing. The displays Apple choose, either in an iMac or stand alone ASD, are high quality and expensive.
If one is concerned about price, just buy a base Mini and get a 4k 27" display from Amazon from other makers, many under $500.
If you qualify (and it isn't hard apparently), you can get a base Mac Mini from the Education store for $499, then all you need is a keyboard and mouse-thing both of which can be bought for a few dollars. Add a $400 display and you've got a system under $1k.
Maybe what we thought was the market for the iMac is just slowly dying off. I'm wanting a new iMac but I'm old and stuck in my ways. Young people today will just get a MacBook Air, and if they need a bigger display they can just hook their MacBook to an external monitor.
If my current iMac broke today I'd probably go the Mac Mini route and not get the current iMac as the replacement. I'm just hoping my current iMac keeps going until Apple decides to offer a high-spec iMac, if that day ever comes.
I am not looking for cheap Mac solution. I am looking for new solution when my 27" iMac will become obsolete. And I can't justify buying something way more expensive. When I add the inflation, the iMac I bought in 2019 would still be cheaper in today's rates than buying Mac Studio + Studio Display + Keyboard + Mouse. And cheap 4K displays won't work for me either, as there are multiple problems with sizing and DPI there. Not to mention I got accustomed to retina display. So there is a still market for affordable AIO with 5K display for sure. It was a perfect ratio of performance + display size and quality + price.
No reason you cannot keep your existing iMac keyboard and mouse. And depending on your usage, you might be able to use a mini instead of a studio.
So the main issue is price? If a Mac Studio + Studio Display + Keyboard + Mouse, all from apple, cost the same as your inflation adjusted iMac, would you be happy?
Right now, I really don't know how strong the demand for a 27" iMac really is.
An iMac made sense back when it was the only real "work" desktop computer you could buy from Apple at a reasonable price. The Mac mini was too underpowered (no discrete graphics card) while the Mac Pro was overkill (and over designed) for the majority of Apple's user base. I think many people hated that the iMac was basically married to a giant display they could not customise or recycle once it was time to upgrade, but what other choice was there?
Apple likely resisted releasing an X-Mac because they knew that their profit margins would crater if people got their hands on an expandable Mac desktop unit that they could keep upgrading the internals for indefinitely. That's why the 2019 Mac Pro was so expensive, and that's why they didn't release the Mac Studio until they had their own custom silicon - with the ram and storage effectively soldered onto the motherboard, it just wasn't feasible to carry out your own upgrades.
Apple also seems to think that the majority of iMac users would be just as well served with a Mac mini or Mac Studio paired with a studio display. This gives users the flexibility of choosing their own screen instead of being locked into the 5k screen that comes default with the iMac. It also lets them upgrade the desktop part independently of the display (which will likely outlast everything else). At this point, I really have no idea how many OG iMac users have since jumped shop, and how many of us are honestly still holding out for one.
No - it's an excellent desktop office computer. I bought mine a year ago, works perfectly today for what I use it for (office and personal stuff).
People who spend a lot of ink trashing the iMac 24 should actually use one for a day or two. It's a great machine. And the webcam is actually better than the webcam on the Apple Studio Display!
The "majority" of iMac users (who use iMacs for generic office work) are well served by... the current 24" iMac!
My sense is that the iMac hasn't sold that well yet - largely because most people using iMacs don't need to upgrade, and the biggest gains from Apple silicon have come on the MacBooks. Most of the stores and such I see are still rocking older iMacs. Once these generic office users need to upgrade, many will buy the current iMac.
Power users, who need more than 32GB Ram, advanced chips, etc, actually have more choice than ever in the current Apple desktop world - Mac minis and Mac Studios with a ton of configurations.
A lot of my relatives are teachers, and their schools still rely on Ethernet for whatever reasons... it's not like that's a meaningless omission.
Ethernet is not "omitted." It was included in my iMac, and is available for $30 per machine on the base iMac. Schools purchasing iMacs for their teachers can surely arrange favorable ethernet pricing when purchasing their machines.
Apparently not enough to drive Apple to release one.
I continue to believe that the marketing folk at Apple know what they are doing. They have a decent, if not total, grasp on what people want.
A long, long time ago, in a job I use to have, I had a Mac II. Remember those? I moved on to a Mac IIcx. I used what was then considered a huge monitor: 20" color display. It was a lovely system, I did much work on it and could crank out documents and presentations of a much higher quality and more quickly than my coworkers could on their DOS machines.
The Mac II family was expandable. It was what you noted above: a box people could upgrade by buying stuff to put in the NuBus slots. You could get Intel processors if you really wanted, and run DOS stuff on them.
It cost a lot more money than today's iMac, or Mac Mini, or even base configs of Mac Studio.
Yet Apple gave up on it after a few years. Last gasp was in the early 1990s.
[Yes, I'm skipping the whole first generations of PowerPC boxes. They were the bad taste in Apple's mouth which is why they needed to do what they did NeXT.]
Apple sort of drifted then, until the first iMac caught the attention of the masses. Apple bought NeXT and that lay the path that Apple is still on today.
Anyway, Apple had an expandable box and gave up on that market back in 1990s. Why? I don't really know, but Apple did learn a lot of hard lessons.
In the end, I think the lesson that was learned is that the market tolerates only one uniform ecosystem of expandable small computers. IBM won (after they had lost and moved on.) [Here I could throw in other contemporary examples, such as the Amiga 2000, of boxes that died in the market.]
So the legacy of Apple was transformed into the iMac. But those days may be gone. Maybe the iMac is no longer a valuable proposition for Apple?
I guess we'll see if or when Apple releases the next iMac.
I've resigned myself to the idea that there may not be a future iMac for me, so I'm now thinking of how to configure a Mac Mini system.
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Price is always an issue in this prosumer segment.
We were spoiled with that 5K 27" iMac. Now the lowest entry point to a 5K display is to fork out $1600. Add a base m2 Mac mini at $800 and you're at $2400 USD.
I think this missing 27" iMac would largely be a moot point if Apple rolled out an 'affordable' 5K display. But that's not gonna happen.
It's literally been omitted from the base model... If you disagree with this statement, refer to a dictionary.