I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.

Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point

[1] <https://support.apple.com/en-us/105126>

Too many great options today to settle that overpriced undersized thing.

These computers are generally obsolete, although they're still useful for period-accurate single-purpose tasks.

Claude can SSH into these old machines to patch issues and write bespoke software. We should reconsider what obsolete means nowadays if agents can help us upcycle old hardware.

If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:

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My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).

My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).

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>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead

This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).

The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.

Only hassle was setting up the Broadcom WiFi drivers which aren't upstream, but I did this before I would have trusted AI with this task and even then it was not a big deal. I think these days running Linux on those things is likely trivial.

My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.

But in principle you are right, the 7y is too restrictive.

I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.

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).

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.

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 still think it captures the ethos of why fairly well.

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.

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.

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…)

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!

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.

There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.

As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.

I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?

2. Aesthetic

3. Pretty colors

4. Nostalgia

But they aren't Apple.

[0] https://www.retinarelay.com/

iPad docking station too

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? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.

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.

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.

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.

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 only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.

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. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.

And if you really want, 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.

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.

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.

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.

"And we’re just getting started."

It is an Apple machine, yes.

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.

This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.

Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...

I used to put post-its on mine too.

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.

Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.

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.

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.

Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.

If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.