Still thinking about Tuesday's Apple event three days later, which probably says more about me than about the event. The Mac Studio is the headline thing, obviously, a little cube that starts at $1,999 and can be configured up to an M1 Ultra chip that Apple spent a solid chunk of the keynote insisting beats a 16-core PC desktop. Fine. I believe them, mostly. Chip benchmarks from a company selling the chip are always a little like asking a barber if you need a haircut, but the M1 stuff has earned some benefit of the doubt at this point.
What I can't stop thinking about is the monitor.
The new Studio Display starts at $1,599. That's already a number that makes you sit with it for a second: a 27 inch 5K screen, no computer inside it doing anything special, just a really nice panel with a 12MP camera and six speakers bolted on. Sure, okay, its the spiritual successor to the old Thunderbolt Display people held onto for a decade because nothing else measured up. I get why it costs real money.
But here's the part that got me: that $1,599 price includes a stand that tilts. Tilts. Up and down, back and forth by some small number of degrees, whatever. If you want the stand to also adjust for height — you know, the thing you'd assume a $1,600 display stand would obviously do — thats a $400 upgrade on top. Four hundred dollars so a pole goes up and down. Or you can skip the stand entirely and get a VESA mount adapter instead, for the same base price, and bolt it to your own arm. There is no version where the stand both tilts and adjusts height for less than two grand total.
Ive been running this blog since November of 2011 and Ive watched Apple accessory pricing get more and more absurd in that time in a way that somehow still surprises me every single time. Remember the $999 monitor stand for the Pro Display XDR back in 2019? People made an entire meme out of that, and I laughed along with everyone else, and then apparently nobody at Apple was in the room for that joke because here we are again, charging extra for a piece of furniture that costs maybe thirty dollars to manufacture. Im not against companies making money. Im against pretending a hinge is a luxury feature.
The rest of the event was actually pretty solid, if I'm honest and not just cranky about stands. The iPhone SE got bumped to a third generation, still with the home button and the fingerprint sensor that I personally still prefer over Face ID some days, now running 5G and the A15 chip for $429. Thats a genuinely good phone for the price, the kind of thing I'd point a relative toward without feeling like I was talking them into a compromise. The iPad Air also picked up the M1 chip, which is a strange amount of power to put into a $599 tablet, but nobody's complaining about that direction.
I dont know. Maybe Im just in a mood this week. Its been grey and wet here for what feels like the entire month, the kind of March where you start questioning your choice of hemisphere, and small annoyances land harder than they should. A $400 monitor stand shouldn't be the hill, but it's the one I'm on today. If you're actually going to buy the Studio Display, budget for the stand upgrade from the start rather than discovering it at checkout like I nearly did while pricing one out for a friend last night. Ask me how I know that surprise works.
Anyway. Coffee's cold, and I've got actual work to do that isn't complaining about aluminum poles on the internet. More soon.