So, the Apple event, covered in this virtual page because what the hell, everyone else is doing it. However, instead of gushing about the super exciting new greens or complaining about the fact that the M1 is more or less wasted on the iPad Air or, god help me, joining the hordes complaining about the inflated new prices, I decided to hyperfocus on one single, specific thing.
The Studio Display has more processing power than my phone.
Yes, I guess that Apple accidentally added a zero to their order of A13 chips and realized only when they were updating the Se to take the A15. And so they had a warehouse of the things they had to get rid of. Executives looked at one another, looked at the products that they hadn’t yet made the transition to Apple Silicon, and put two and two together.
It’s weird times when I look at that and not only think that it’s more powerful than my phone, but it stands a decent chance at being powerful enough so that people who use their iMac in the way apple haters think everyone with one uses it, it would honestly probably make little difference to them compared to the M1 now fitted to the 21.5”, even if there are substantial performance differences.
Instead, Apple is using the computer powered bestowed to the iPhone 11 Pro Max to enable cool functionality for the people who will drop $1600 in it to breathe new life to their macs instead of just dropping an additional two grand for the Mac Studio. The most important of these for these sort of device is Center Stage. On a mobile device, you can sort of deal with the lack of it by doing the same thing people have been doing since they’ve had instant cameras, move the phone a little farther away and move the laptop to and fro. That’s certainly going to be more difficult to do with the Studio display, which only offers tilt or tilt-and-rotation if you don’t spring for the VESA mount. So suddenly being able to dynamically move and fit more people into a picture is a good thing. This is before realizing it means that all of the image processing and flattering touch-ups provided by the camera are in there as well.
There’s also spatial Audio, which is impressive but slightly less life-changing on the desktop, and voice commands with Siri. Which if you are using, don’t forget to order a new keyboard as yours has clearly failed. All of this available even if you are still running one of the failure-prone 2016-style MacBook pros.
Much ado has been made about how the panel and many of the features of the Studio Display are suspiciously similar to the much less expensive 27” LG UltraFine 5k. However, by providing this functionality to older users with no performance hit thanks to all of the processing being done on the A13, they have made it rise above its more “Budget Oriented” counterpart.
And now I feel like the engineers who realized that any kid running around with a TI-83 had more computing power at their disposal than the guys working the Lunar Module.
