Last week’s “Peek Performance” event saw the company debut its latest low-cost iPhone, a revamped iPad Air, an external display and, oh yes, the first all-new Mac model in years. These announcements have sparked a heap of handy fruit and rumors of hardware introductions, with around three months until the likely next gathering, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Sure, the company could offload and hold its own until the iPhone launches in September, leaving June to deal with numerous updates to its software platforms, but that doesn’t seem likely. Last week’s announcements may have answered some questions about the future of Apple’s product roadmap, but they also raised new ones.
Professional store
True to its word, Apple is focused on completing its two-year transition from the Mac line to Apple Silicon. Apple senior vice president John Ternus said there was only one model left to make the leap: the Mac Pro. With WWDC on the horizon, there’s sure to be a huge crowd of developers and pro users waiting to see what Apple has to offer in its most powerful Mac, especially in the wake of the new high-end Mac Studio, which Apple says is the best. Intel-based Mac Pro in many benchmarks.
After almost two years of Apple silicon, no one wonders if Apple can match the power of the processors powering the previous Mac Pro. But sheer speed and performance weren’t the Pro’s only appeal: when designing the Mac Pro in 2019, Apple went to great lengths to accommodate high-powered, hot-running Intel chips, as well as to create a huge expandable architecture that not only included ports galore, but internal expansion slots as well.
The latter is one thing the Mac Pro offers that the Studio can’t match: Apple’s newest machine may be a powerhouse, but it doesn’t have any internal upgrade capability. Like other Apple silicon machines, the RAM you buy is the RAM you have forever. Will Apple continue on this path for the Pro? Or will it manage to maintain the expandability that the pros seem to enjoy? There have been rumors of a smaller Mac Pro, which may have concerned the Studio, but could also signal that Apple’s cooler running chips don’t require such a large chassis.
The Mac Studio has enough processing power to surpass Intel’s current Mac Pro, but its design lacks the flexibility that many power users need.
Apple
Stuck in the middle with you
The Pro may be the last Mac to make the transition to Apple silicon, but that doesn’t mean it’s the last Apple silicon-based Mac model we might see.
With the demise of the 27-inch iMac, there’s a gap in the Mac lineup around the $2,000 to $3,000 range. Will Apple offer something to sit between the M1-powered Mac mini and 24-inch iMac models, and the new Mac Studio? The most recent rumors suggest that the Mac mini might pick up an M2 Pro option later this year, which would make sense given that the high-end Intel Mac mini is still on sale. The use and configuration of the Mac mini is so varied that it’s an attractive option for purposes such as servers, which might require something more than an M1.
Specifically, Apple likes a chance to sell. Right now, the nearly $2,000 gap between a high-end iMac and a base model Mac Studio and display is a little harder to overcome. When it comes to laptops, iPads, and iPhones, the company prides itself on having devices at every price point. It’s hard to imagine the desktop Mac lineup not following this in some respects.
Apple still sells an Intel Mac mini. Maybe Apple will re-engineer it with Apple silicon so it fills the gap between the iMac and the Mac Studio.
iPad display model
A miracle of miracles, Apple apparently listened to its customers by not only adding a more powerful and expandable Mac to the lineup, but pairing it with a (more) affordable display. At $1,599 the Apple Studio Display isn’t cheap, but it’s way better than the Apple Pro Display XDR, especially if you want to pair it with a Mac mini, laptop or even, yeah , an iPad. Apple has confirmed that the Studio Display will work with the third-generation 12.9-inch iPad or later, the 11-inch iPad, and the fifth-generation iPad Air.
The question is…why? Yes, support for external displays for the iPad has been around for a little while, but it’s still quite limited: some apps support external displays, but in many cases you end up with a large iPad display. It’s a far cry from the kind of powerful windowing that’s been around on the Mac for decades.
Some third-party apps are trying to fill this void, but it’s a situation that really calls for Apple to address it within the confines of iPadOS itself. And it’s not that the iPad hardware can’t handle it: the latest iPad Pro and iPad Air models use the same M1 chip in the Mac mini and 24-inch iMac.
There’s no guarantee this will be fixed in iPadOS 16 – it’s one of those eternal wishlist items – but with new hardware opening the door to more powerful iPad use, the time may have finally come.
