It's been almost a week since the WWDC keynote and I still can't stop thinking about the stand.
Not the Mac Pro. Not even the display itself, which by every account is a genuinely stunning piece of engineering, 6K resolution, a thousand nits sustained brightness, the works. I'm talking about the little aluminum arm that holds the Pro Display XDR up off your desk. Apple wants four thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars for the display (six grand if you want the nano-texture glass that doesn't glare), and then, almost as an afterthought during the keynote, it turned out the stand is not included. That's another nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. If you just want to bolt the thing to an arm you already own, there's a $199 VESA adapter instead, which is at least something.
I did the math on my own desk setup last night out of morbid curiosity and I own maybe four hundred dollars of furniture total, desk included. So the stand alone costs more than everything I'm sitting at right now. Twitter noticed this within about ninety seconds of the keynote clip going up and it hasn't let go since. Every day this week there's been a new joke format, screenshots of the checkout page, people photoshopping the stand next to a used Honda Civic. I'm not usually one to pile onto a meme but I have to admit I laughed at the one comparing it to a $999 bag of sand from an art installation a few years back. Cruel, but not exactly wrong.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me though, and it's not really about the money, because let's be honest, nobody buying a $5,999 reference monitor for color grading film was going to blink at another grand for the stand that goes with it. Professional monitors have always been absurdly priced and this crowd knows that going in. What bugs me is that Apple didn't say the price out loud during the keynote segment where they announced it. They just kind of let it sit on the slide and moved on, and the internet had to go dig through the order page afterward to confirm it was real and not a typo. That's a weirdly cagey way to reveal a headline number for a product you're clearly proud of. If you're confident in the price, say the price.
Anyway, the rest of the keynote was a lot to take in and I'm still going through it piece by piece. Dark mode is finally here system wide on iOS 13, which, fine, took long enough, I know plenty of people who held off on iPhones specifically waiting for this (my cousin included, he's been complaining about it since 2017). There's a new Sign In With Apple button that's supposed to be a more private alternative to the Facebook and Google login buttons every app shoves at you, which sounds good on paper and I'll believe it works well once I've actually used it in a real app instead of a keynote slide. iPadOS is getting split into its own thing separate from iOS, with actual mouse support finally, which is a bigger deal than it sounds if you've ever tried to use an iPad as a real work machine and hit a wall.
And in a smaller story that got a little buried under all the Apple noise, Google put real numbers on Stadia earlier this week. Founders Edition is $129, gets you three months of Stadia Pro, a Night Blue controller, and a Destiny 2 bundle thrown in. Ongoing Pro subscription after that is $9.99 a month. There's apparently going to be a free tier eventually too, just not at launch. I'm mildly interested in the idea of streaming games without a console sitting under my TV, but I've been burned enough times by streaming anything over my apartment wifi that I'm not pre-ordering anything until I see it actually run on a normal connection, not a demo booth with dedicated fiber.
Between the stand jokes and everyone re-litigating whether cloud gaming can ever really feel instant, it's been a genuinely fun week to read tech twitter, even if my own desk situation remains humiliatingly stand-less by comparison.