The Lonely iMac

Luke Mi­ani ar­gues that Ap­ple should have a 27 inch iMac in its lineup in or­der to serve the pro­fes­sional crowd. Typ­i­cally the pro­fes­sional crowd has sig­nif­i­cantly big­ger bud­gets to spend on tech­nol­ogy and they have sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent re­quire­ments for these tools. In the­ory they would value new ad­vances in tech tech­nolo­gies sig­nif­i­cantly above the con­sumer mar­ket be­cause they could hy­po­thet­i­cally make a dif­fer­ence. there have been some sig­nif­i­cant ad­vances in the dis­play tech­nol­ogy how­ever the de­vel­op­ment of com­puter in­ter­nals has sig­nif­i­cantly out­paced with the growth of the dis­play tech­nolo­gies as such this has pro­duced a tech­no­log­i­cal dilemma for Ap­ple. As a very en­vi­ron­men­tally friendly com­pany Ap­ple wants to de­liver the best value to its con­sumers whilst pre­serv­ing the planet.

There is typ­i­cally two desk­top form fac­tors; one has the dis­play sep­a­rate of the com­puter and the other has a com­puter in­te­grated in the dis­play. Cur­rently there is only one in­te­grated so­lu­tion, the 24 inch iMac. This com­puter does not of­fer any other chip ex­cept the base level con­fig­u­ra­tion also known as an M chip. Sep­a­rately from a dis­play there are two com­put­ers that are of­fered they are Mark stu­dio and Mac mini. Both of these com­put­ers cover the en­tire range of power and use cases. The Mac mini has the base M chip and the M Pro chip, while the Mac Stu­dio has the M Max chip and M ul­tra chip.

Why does Apple do this?

Ap­ple’s phi­los­o­phy is very sim­ple. They see that they can up­date the dis­plays and com­putes sep­a­rately at dif­fer­ent speeds. Ad­di­tion­ally you can re­place the dis­play with­out re­plac­ing the en­tire com­puter. The setup is sig­nif­i­cantly more mod­u­lar and that is a big ben­e­fit for pro­fes­sional users who care about hav­ing the best dis­play or the best com­puter. Al­ter­na­tively you can get what­ever dis­play you re­quire for the use. For ex­am­ple if you would like to have an OLED panel on the dis­play or the 240 frames re­fresh rate or 32” inch curved panel; you can get that sep­a­rately. At the cost of a lit­tle bit more money.

Ad­di­tion­ally Ap­ple is very clever about sell­ing you their dis­plays in­de­pen­dently be­cause you can con­nect it to the Mac­Book or iPad, so you don’t nec­es­sar­ily need a sep­a­rate desk­top com­puter. Again it is more con­ve­nient. Their goal with their dis­plays is to pro­vide that are best in class over­all. If this means that one day they de­cide to swap to miniLED or tan­dum OLED you can buy the dis­plays sep­a­rately from the com­puter.

It is very amaz­ing that now you can use an iPad with an ex­ter­nal mon­i­tor be­cause you can use an ex­ter­nal key­board and mouse or a track­pad or work while hav­ing two dis­plays. For a lot of peo­ple that means they do not need a Mac for their work­flow.

Why does iMac still exist then?

For the most crowd when you buy an iMac you buy an all in one, but you buy it fore­most be­cause you want to buy a good dis­play with an in built com­puter and not have to worry about buy­ing two sep­a­rate things. ”For con­sumers you need sim­plic­ity, for pro­fes­sion­als you need choice” this sen­tence would en­com­pass the phi­los­o­phy that sep­a­rates the two cat­e­gories and the de­ci­sions that are made. This is the rea­son why the iMac ex­ists in one size with one chip. It ex­ists to serve the need of cer­tain con­sumers for this type of de­vice, for every­one else there is Mac pause or iPad and Mac­Book. Portable de­vices are so pow­er­ful right now that the rea­son why the all in one com­puter isn’t be­ing sold is be­cause a lot of the au­di­ence has fun­nelled into other prod­ucts that weren’t pos­si­ble 10 years ago.

What is Next?

Ap­ple Vi­sion cat­e­gory is ex­plor­ing a new con­cept which is a Vir­tual Dis­play. The fact that you can in­ter­act and make the dis­plays big­ger than ever in Vi­sion OS 2, shows that Ap­ple is lean­ing very heav­ily into the head­set tech­nol­ogy re­plac­ing dis­plays one day through lever­ag­ing the high­est and most dense res­o­lu­tion micro-OLED dis­plays that ex­ist cur­rently at the price which is sig­nif­i­cantly more af­ford­able than Ap­ple Dis­play XDR.

How­ever for to­day, the qual­ity of the Vir­tual dis­play is lim­ited so it may cater to­wards the au­di­ence that does not care so much about res­o­lu­tion and places the greater em­pha­sis on the fact that they can lever­age the spa­tial com­put­ing to have a lot of win­dows to mul­ti­task while in­creas­ing the size of the dis­play for the Mac plat­form that aren’t com­mer­cially vi­able.

We have to wait and see what the Vi­sion OS 3 would bring along side the lower price point of the Ap­ple Vi­sion Air.