So the Mac Studio and Studio Display actually started shipping this past Friday, and I've spent the weekend reading every review I can find instead of doing the taxes I promised myself I'd finish by Sunday night. (I will not be finishing my taxes tonight either, if we're being honest.)
The Mac Studio itself looks like exactly what it is — a Mac mini that hit the gym for a year. Fine. Great, even, if you need that kind of power and have a spare $1,999 to $3,999 lying around depending on configuration. I don't, so that part of the story isn't really mine to have opinions about.
What I do have an opinion about is the Studio Display, and specifically its camera, because every review that landed this week says roughly the same thing: it's not good. The 12MP Ultra Wide sensor is the same one Apple's been putting in iPhones for a few generations now, it supports Center Stage, it's got three mics and a six-speaker system built into a piece of glass that starts at $1,599 before you even add a stand that tilts, and somehow the actual video coming out of it looks soft and kind of grainy in normal indoor light. The Verge called it out specifically in their review. So did a handful of the YouTube reviewers who got units early. Apple's already telling outlets a software update is coming to fix the image processing, which is one of those admissions that answers whether something's broken by promising to unbreak it later.
Here's the part that actually gets me. This is Apple, the company that will spend four minutes of a keynote on computational photography and how some new image signal processor is going to change your Tuesday. And they shipped a $1,599 external display with a camera that a $79 webcam might beat on a bad day. It's probably not that the hardware itself is bad, the sensor's clearly capable, it reads more like a tuning and processing problem, which honestly might be worse, because that means somebody signed off on it before it shipped.
I've been using a five-year-old Logitech clipped to the top of my monitor for video calls since basically the pandemic started, and it looks fine. Not great. Fine. I bring this up because I was actually half-considering the Studio Display for my own desk this summer, mostly for the extra screen real estate, figuring the camera would just be a nice bonus on top of that. Turns out the bonus is worse than the $70 clip-on I already own. That's a strange place for a company whose entire brand is built on sweating the details to end up.
None of this tanks the Studio Display as a monitor, to be clear. If you want a 27-inch 5K panel and you're already living in the Apple ecosystem, your choices were thin to begin with, and this is still probably the best one on paper, glass coating options and all. But it's a decent reminder that the keynote and the actual unit sitting on a reviewer's desk are two different objects, and that hands-on time still matters even when a company's track record is usually this good. I'll wait for the promised update before deciding anything, and I'll probably wait a few more months past that anyway, because $1,599 is $1,599 regardless of what the webcam does.
Also, unrelated but rattling around my head all weekend: does the Mac Studio actually count as a desktop, or is it just a very well-dressed Mac mini in a taller box? I keep going back and forth and landing nowhere useful. If you've got a strong opinion, I'd genuinely like to hear it.