> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
Yes, I liked using them for NAS builds. Great for ZFS machines.
Intel is weird with their stuff like that, I wrote about how they introduced and then dropped an SHA instruction that could be used to optimize hashing (useful for things like block checksum hashes on storage servers) before: https://neosmart.net/blog/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-...
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.
I have a 60hz monitor and a 144hz monitor and I simply can't tell the difference in normal usage. I can see a difference on something like http://testufo.com if I specifically look for it, and until I checked that I assumed the OS was just lying to me and the monitor was actually set to 60hz.
It's odd because I can tell right away if a game is set to 60Hz instead of 144Hz when first launched before I adjust the settings. The mouse cursor just feels laggy.
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to have a slice of Altman's memory.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
What is it with fabs where there is just no competition springing up outside the existing memory cartels? Is the knowledge of how to build and run a fab strictly controlled by these companies? Is all qualified talent just immediately poached and put behind NDA? It just makes no sense. Capitalism would suggest these conditions with so much unstable equilibrium in this market would see increase in supply to take advantage of the pricing. The fact that this isn't playing out as such suggests there are some very powerful thumbs on the scale of this "free" market.
It takes about a decade to bring one up and during EVERY wave of a booming memory demand supply crunch there has been a subsequent round of major bankruptcies from suppliers who decided to scale and had no demand when they finally got online.
The conspiracy is real, it's even been proven in court, but as things stand, it's also necessary because of the factors you describe. Investors will not touch the DRAM market with a 10-foot pole, so it has had to rely on self-funding. While there have been state subsidies too, price fixing has proven to be the most effective way to survive the extreme volatility and fund the massive capex necessary for each generational leap. They have gotten a bit more sophisticated about it since the court case 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell, it's basically the same as it's ever been. The lack of effective competition is a function of the market itself, not any tilted scales. If anything, tilting the scales on purpose with greater state involvement is the only way to change the dynamics, but few states have the capacity and competence to carry that out effectively.
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
SSD token caching (like oMLX does) goes a long way for prefill. Typical miss rates are under 5% in long coding sessions, which is mostly the output of a turn's tool use.
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
Yes the latest chip is better but the rumor is that the M7 has either more/better parts for LLM math OR that it has significiant changes to memory bandwidth too.
I guess this means I’ll be hanging onto my M1 Pro for another year and seeing what M7 has to offer.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
More on the curse side, tbh. Mostly because RAM and flash chips have exploded in price and fabs get now booked by NVIDIA et al where previously Apple was the biggest dog and could demand better conditions.
But well, they'll survive :) Their M-series was a stroke of luck considering AI.
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. And you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
Go ahead and run Gemma4 on your M1, and you will find that its unusable at 12 tok/sec.
And this is also not touching prefill, which is the biggest thing that you need fast, and Apple sucks in this regard compared to nvidia cards. With gfx cards, you can throw big codebases at the local models and it will happily crunch through them in very little time.
Sure, spending 1.5k on a Macbook enables you to run a local model, and if you really have a good reason for running local (like running heretic/abliterated models) for tasks you don't mind waiting for, it works. The difference is, spend 1k more and let you never have to pay for tokens, and you can run inference all day long without your computer thermal throttling, like your Macbook.
And I don't need to make assumptions when you say idiotic stuff like "We're getting close to local AI being really useful", like you have any idea what you are talking about. On par with being an Apple fan though.
A $2500 Mac Studio with M5 Max running Qwen3.8-27b or Gemma4:31b in oMLX gets about the same speeds you quoted... and it comes with a warranty and has enough memory not to choke at longer context lengths.
Srouji is killing it on whatever he has on mind or is asked to do. Everyone is riling up on GPU and Cloud AI costs. 99.99% of what people use AI for today already processes fine on an M1 from 5 years ago.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
An imac doesn't strike me as a desktop with proper cooling. Maybe they do some funny business in the chassis, but its pretty clear that airflow has been put on the bench in favor of having a sexy thin backside.
Desktop maybe, but Imac that costs more for the same specs of the mini you can shove in the drawer in a desk? I mean with the airspace taken up by an imac you only remotely connect to you could probably have two side by side stacks of I don't know, maybe 20 mac minis each? HPC territory.
But the iMacs only have the sans-adjective M-series processors. And is it really gonna have optimal thermals in that thin frame pressed against a big, bright high-res screen?
If you need to push performance you'd probably go for a Mac Studio, no? Or at least a Mini.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
I think it's mainly that from 2006 to 2019, the iMac was the only mid-tier desktop that Apple sold. Today, you can get a Mac mini or MBP that's the same or faster than an iMac.
There was a quad core Mini back in 2011. The old iMac was a good all in one package for designers, especially because you'd spend half or more for an equivalent quality screen.
I did have a 2010 Mac mini server, don't remember how it compared to the non-server one other than having dual HDDs instead of the DVD drive. I put them in RAID-1.
I agree with you, but Apple's monitor situation is letting everybody down. Not having a 32" monitor for professionals is frustrating. I am glad I bought my Pro Display XDR.
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
There are countless non-5k iMacs. I never said it had to be that. I had a beautiful 27” 2.5k display from 2011 I could’ve put to work.
There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.
Yes the previous iMacs sent a signal. Their current computers don’t receive the signal. This is not about the 5K display, you’re missing the core problem. It stopped working when the silicon line came out. It doesn’t work anymore, at all. You can’t get any iMac to work in target display mode on silicon Macs.
That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore.
You cannot grab an iMac, plug it into a silicon Mac, and get a picture on the iMac (without 3rd party software). This is incorrect. Please go look this up. The feature stopped working when silicon Mac’s came out. It only works on Intel Macs. 5K iMac or not.
Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.
When they very first came out in 2014, they were mostly limited to displayport 1.2, which was unable to support 5K without either dropping to 45Hz or using chroma subsampling. So the 2014 version is excused, and we can excuse the 2015 version too.
But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.
And they've left it out ever since.
Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
I'm pretty sure it relies on Mac APIs like Metal and ScreenCaptureKit but it's worth reaching out to the developer. He was very responsive when I requested features, and it may be a lot easier to build a windows application that adheres to the protocol using agentic development.
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
You need to increase UI scaling, not turn down the resolution. All modern desktops support this in some form. I would only lower the resolution if the GPU can't keep up in games after exhausting all other options such as AI upscaling.
I have 4K at 32". It's pretty sharp but at 6K the pixels would be significantly less visible, and I could run it at an even 200% so that older programs don't have scaling issues.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
Fair point but do people really need high pixel density at 32"?
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I’ve got a 32” 4k monitor at work, and a 27” 5k at home (the rather problematic LG one; got it just as it was being taken off the market in Europe over emissions rules). The 27” is so much nicer.
And it's almost impossible to find ones that get as bright as Apple monitors for less than Apple charges!
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
All of Apple’s operating systems are designed for high PPI displays. There’s no font hinting, no subpixel AA. Apple decided long ago that a high pixel density is a baseline requirement for any device they sell, including computers, since the 2010s.
Given that the smartphone industry also adopted high PPI displays as a minimum standard, it’s actually the external display industry that is the odd one out here. Low PPI displays should have gone the way of CRTs, but they cling on.
It's incredibly easy to see the difference. Cell phones used to have low-DPI displays, and I don't think you can find anybody who wouldn't be able to easily see the difference.
Retina displays have been around for more than 10 years now and are just much better than low-DPI displays. Especially for text and user interfaces. For movies or gaming it doesn't matter so much.
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
any specific model you had in mind? when I'm looking at the Lenovo offering, the "built-in" webcams are protruding and if I pair it with 4k resolution I quickly end up at 1300 dollars (yoga pro)... for $1600 you get the 5k apple Studio Display.
DELL too, bought a 4k 24" conference monitor off a second hand site for £80. It's got a good quality pop-up webcam, too.
Usb hub, hdmi/dp ports, Ethernet on the back. Connects and powers the laptop with a single thunderbolt usb-c cable.
Not sure about ppi and stuff, but works great for me.
I've got one. It can be a bit annoying because I have a Samsung TV in the same room, and turning the TV off with its remote sometimes also turns the monitor off.
iPhones have great cameras. Get a MagSafe mount for on top of the monitor and stick the camera to it. The feature is called "continuity camera", and it works with any Mac app that would use a USB webcam.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
What about Dell's UltraSharp series? I have a 1440p 27" one and the only complaint I have is that that particular model has a bit of inverse ghosting. Not egregiously so but compared to my ugly MSI gaming monitor right next to it it's a bit noticeable.
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine.
> Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
My Mom had a 2008 20" iMac. When it got long in the tooth, we replaced it with an M1 in 2021 or 2022. She was disappointed she wasn't able to get a 20" screen again and had to get one with a huge 24" screen!
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
I think it's obvious why someone would buy this and why Apples continues to slowly update them.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
The Eames Lounge Chair is a terrible example; you can buy near-exact clones for about 1/7th the price of a real one. There's one in the room with me right now. It's fantastic, and will probably last me decades.
Unfortunately there are strangely no clones of current imacs.
I would buy one in a heartbeat!
But basically no AIOs or monitors come anywhere near the "slab on a stand" look of current imacs/Studio displays - would love one for my next Linux PC though...
Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
Try to find a good monitor with a good integrated webcam, speaker, microphone and usb-hub. You simply won't find any except Apple Studio Displays which start at $1500.
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
"You can get the same thing for less money" has never been an effective criticism vs Apple computers. People will pay the extra $800 so they don't have to also buy a 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse... and they'll all be the same color.
I kinda agree with you but this is for people who don't want to think about it. That 24" monitor is incredible compared to anything sub 500.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
Recently bought a retina 32” screen (Japannext 6k 32”) for around $800. Pretty sure you can get a decent kb and mouse for under $100. But a “magic trackpad” alone is way more than that.
Looks like a cool monitor (900 euros here). I am happy to see that there are more and more of products in this category popping up. I wish they would chose better names though (Kuyon is pushing it, but Japannext is very Aliexpress coded).
Apple will happily sell you the Mac mini for that setup too. Or the Mac Studio if you want something beefier.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
The price put upon "I don't have to go figure out what a good monitor is and what are good input devices".
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
Well, I got M4 iMac because I wanted a screen on my workbench with minimum cables and must be VESA mounted. I also needed a mac to build iOS apps. iMac was perfect fit.
Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
367 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadThe ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Intel is weird with their stuff like that, I wrote about how they introduced and then dropped an SHA instruction that could be used to optimize hashing (useful for things like block checksum hashes on storage servers) before: https://neosmart.net/blog/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-...
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
The fabs are terrified to overscale in case the market collapses before the builds are complete.
> AI datacenter provisioning will go down
Depends on political opposition at both local and national levels. Hard to predict the future, which feeds into the previous point.
Have you not seen Micron or Sandisk stock?
Micron's stock price did go way up, after they stopped selling DRAM to the consumer market. It has been flat for several months though.
What's your point here?
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? It will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
Yes the latest chip is better but the rumor is that the M7 has either more/better parts for LLM math OR that it has significiant changes to memory bandwidth too.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
But well, they'll survive :) Their M-series was a stroke of luck considering AI.
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. And you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
Try more like 70-130 tok/sec. https://github.com/L-Forster/open-jet/tree/master/megakernel.
And also Qwen models famously chase benchmarks. They are good for writing code, but fall behind in other areas. Gemma4:31B is 6gb larger and does a much better job across all areas. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vyzopv/gemma4_...
Go ahead and run Gemma4 on your M1, and you will find that its unusable at 12 tok/sec.
And this is also not touching prefill, which is the biggest thing that you need fast, and Apple sucks in this regard compared to nvidia cards. With gfx cards, you can throw big codebases at the local models and it will happily crunch through them in very little time.
Sure, spending 1.5k on a Macbook enables you to run a local model, and if you really have a good reason for running local (like running heretic/abliterated models) for tasks you don't mind waiting for, it works. The difference is, spend 1k more and let you never have to pay for tokens, and you can run inference all day long without your computer thermal throttling, like your Macbook.
And I don't need to make assumptions when you say idiotic stuff like "We're getting close to local AI being really useful", like you have any idea what you are talking about. On par with being an Apple fan though.
I'm one of those Mac users, but I do have a linux tower for remote dev work and LLMs.
Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
If you need to push performance you'd probably go for a Mac Studio, no? Or at least a Mini.
I did have a 2010 Mac mini server, don't remember how it compared to the non-server one other than having dual HDDs instead of the DVD drive. I put them in RAID-1.
If you need portability, you have your phone already.
I used to put post-its on mine too.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
"And we’re just getting started."
It is an Apple machine, yes.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
Everything I use, literally everything, is either cloud or a box I’m ssh’d into.
I can see how I’m the exception, though.
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
Would have bought one otherwise.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
If you have an older 5k iMac, there is an inexpensive third party hardware kit to convert it into a display with modern connectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VXQu0fAc8s
There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.
They dropped it when the cable and connector standards of the day didn't support a display that big.
That's not laziness, it's a technical limitation.
Now that we have newer high bandwidth connection standards, you can once again use an iMac as an external display over a thunderbolt connection.
That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore.
If you're OK with video compression artifacts, you can even do it over a WiFi connection.
Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.
At least you can finally acknowledge reality.
Also, VLC over a wired connection and streaming from one Mac to another using WiFi (AirPlay) are built into the OS.
> It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.
And they've left it out ever since.
Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!
Would just be nice if I could buy the monitors from apple too.
iPad docking station too
[0] https://www.retinarelay.com/
And I don't need to run games at full resolution.
You might not think it’s much harder, but it’s harder.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1v87f6i/moni...
[2] https://kuycon.us/monitors/P20
Even using the sale prices, an iMac is still cheaper than a Mini with the Kuycon.
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I feel like 1440p is already the sweet spot.
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
Lots and lots of people use 15.6" laptop with 1080p screen and are perfectly happy.
Every time I see people talk like this, I have to wonder who it is for.
Given that the smartphone industry also adopted high PPI displays as a minimum standard, it’s actually the external display industry that is the odd one out here. Low PPI displays should have gone the way of CRTs, but they cling on.
Retina displays have been around for more than 10 years now and are just much better than low-DPI displays. Especially for text and user interfaces. For movies or gaming it doesn't matter so much.
2. Aesthetic
3. Pretty colors
4. Nostalgia
It is ugly. Especially i places like a reception, where the back of the screen is facing the customer. Plain and simple.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
It’s also a usb c dock with a Ethernet port
Not sure about ppi and stuff, but works great for me.
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
Thanks!
Huawei mateview is also quite eye-candy.
As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.
I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
I would buy one in a heartbeat!
But basically no AIOs or monitors come anywhere near the "slab on a stand" look of current imacs/Studio displays - would love one for my next Linux PC though...
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
Totally different markets.
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
The magic trackpad is nice, but really not required.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
I still think it captures the ethos of why fairly well.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.