Apple at its best, and what drew me into the company back in high school, is when they announce products in the pro tier of their Mac lineup. Lust-worthy items with exorbitant prices that I desperately want, but cannot hope to afford. I remember when the 30-inch Cinema Display was first introduced: a display so unimaginably large that costs more than entire computer systems! I wanted one immediately, though sadly had to wait for that display technology to trickle down to the hundreds of dollars range many, many years later.
I also remember the first ever Mac Pro, a monster of a computing machine for three times the costs of my poverty-spec Macbook laptop. I couldn’t possibly utilize all that number-crunching power (much less pay the price), but the 'cheese grater’ tower just looks so damn awesome. Apple is clever like that, aren’t they? Their superb ability to make people pine for their products is one of the biggest reason I upgrade to the latest iPhone every year, even though for my purposes I’d still be okay currently with an iPhone 8.
So today it was a throwback of sorts for Apple at their annual developer conference, where they announced a brand new Mac Pro tower, and a 6K display to do along with it. The unit starts at $5999, and the monitor is $4999 for the panel only; the aluminum ‘Pro’ stand with the fancy hinge mechanism is another $999 on top! I could hear the collective groan from the audience over the keynote livestream when the guy on stage announced the stand was separate and costs the same as an iPhone. This is Apple pricing madness at its best, and it brings me back to youth.
Of course, the specs of the new machine and the display is out of this world, and just like a decade before with the old Mac Pro and pro display, it’s way more computing power than I can ever use in my current capacity as a photography hobbyist and a writer. The difference now is that I don’t want the new Mac Pro at all, even though I can somewhat afford it (just have to put a few things up on eBay). Perhaps its my adult sensibilities coming into effect: I no longer buy things for the heck of it; the item has got to serve a purpose. My two years old 27-inch iMac is still up to the tasks superbly, so there’s no reason to replace it with a far nicer box for marginal gains in speed.
Indeed, the new Mac Pro and Pro Display is strictly for the professionals, the type who can expense such extravagant acquisition on their respective company accounts. I’m definitely not one of those people, the type to work with three simultaneous streams of 8K footage, or mix 1000 tracks of sound at the same time.
Who am I kidding, though; I still want it.
Just some late night filings…