On March 9, 2022, Apple is about to hold the first hardware conference of the year, according to the schedule of apple's previous update products, we are likely to see a new third-generation iPhone SE and a series of Mac series products using the next generation of Apple's self-developed chips (possibly M2), such as macBook Air laptops with M2 chips and new color designs.
But according to recent revelations, at the conference of the theme of harmonic "peak performance at a glance", Apple seems to have more new products to release, such as a new Mac mini Studio with a stronger processor, and Apple's first private label display product in the Apple Silicon era - Apple Studio Display 7K. Why emphasize that this is the Apple Silicon era? There are two reasons: first, before the Pro XDR screen priced at 40,000 yuan, Apple has launched 9 first-party displays called Apple Cinema Display for Mac products; second, according to the news, this screen may be equipped with Apple's A13 chip.
That's right, after deciding not to stuff A-series chips into wireless chargers, Apple finally set its sights on the monitor.
Apple product four-quadrant layout
Before analyzing the 7K display on the Web, let's take a look at the potential product that is "relatively more nailed on the board" - Mac mini Studio or Mac Studio (hereinafter referred to as Mac Studio to distinguish it).
First, we want to clarify a concept: what are the four quadrants of Apple's Mac products? In simple terms, the Mac's four quadrants are drawn according to the "home - professional" and "mobile - desktop" two indicators drawn out of the table, whether you want a "home desktop computer" or "professional mobile computer", or any other combination, the Mac product line can meet your needs: professional users can choose MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, the average home user can choose iMac, Mac mini or even iPad.
This is not my own idea, even Apple's own product strategy reveals this "four-quadrant" differentiation: since updating the Mac Pro product line in 2019 and shunting professional users from the iMac sequence, Apple has not updated its own iMac Pro product line for 5 years, and even the interface upgrade or CPU upgrade has not been released. At the same time, the pen product Pioneer also gave up the New MacBook, which is not high or low, and handed over the responsibility of the entry-light computer to the lighter iPad series.
One of the advantages of streamlining the product line with the four-quadrant method is that it can integrate consumer demand and cover more consumers with fewer models, thereby optimizing the supply chain and saving costs. But the disadvantages of this are also obvious: the integration of requirements often means a compromise of requirements, and although the product line is integrated, the needs of some professional users for small-size high-performance computers cannot be integrated. Hastily pushing them to the higher end of the Mac Pro will only raise the cost of their work, pushing potential consumers towards their competitors.
Considering the shortcomings of the Mac mini product using the M1 chip in terms of IO and performance, it seems that it is not impossible for Apple to launch the so-called Mac Studio and Studio Display 7K. First, although Apple has been doing its best to promote the graphics performance of Apple Silicon chips in the past two years, due to the different ways in which the ARM structure handles bandwidth or other reasons, any Mac computer currently on sale with M1 series chips (including Pro and Max) cannot use the Thunderbolt interface to connect to the external GPU normally, which means that M1 chip computers can hardly use external graphics cards as display expansion and hardware acceleration. In addition, the M1 chip computer's support for Thunderbolt displays is not as good as that of traditional Mac computers using Intel chips, which is the result of both using Apple's special DP compression protocol.
In other words, although Apple has been promoting its Mac mini in a way similar to the "small steel cannon", but subject to the performance of the M1 chip, the M1 Mac mini has always been a small and portable "family car" - although it has not lost" in front of traffic lights, it is still a family car from the perspective of wave box, suspension and even exhaust. If you want a real "performance car", you have to look at the "Mac Studio" that is built for performance from the bone.
The largest market for potential accessories outside of the iPhone
After talking about Mac Studio, let's talk about "another new product in the Studio series" - Studio Display 7K display. Contrary to the perception of many people, the display market is a market with a very high upper limit but a very low lower limit. If you don't have bad money and just want to build a "top screen", all kinds of monitor manufacturers are happy to customize any hardware you want.
But if you only want to use the lowest cost to create a screen that can be lit, your choices are also innumerable, many domestic mobile phone brand monitors use this road, some brands in the ecological label, but also the 166PPI 4K screen sold to a price of four thousand yuan. It can be seen that for brands with computer business, the market behind "first-party displays" is still very broad.
But for Apple, even though the display may be the biggest potential accessory market for macs other than docking, the money doesn't seem to be as lucrative as we think.
For Apple, the biggest obstacle between itself and the display market is not from friends, but from Apple itself. Since the high brightness and high resolution screen is already the standard of the iMac and MacBook series products, the cost behind the Mac product is destined to be not low if you want to continue the Mac display effect in addition to the Mac product. For example, in order to ensure the graphic rendering effect, macOS in the Retina era will use multiple physical pixels to render a logical pixel on the screen, and the effect is naturally sharper than that of the blue and yellow Windows computer.
But this also puts forward higher requirements for the PPI of the Mac, such as the screen of the MacBook Air to 227PPI, while the common 24-inch 1080P screen, the PPI is only 91.97. Even the High-End 27-inch 4K screen in the Windows camp has a PPI of only 163. Because the display panels on the market that meet the requirements of Apple and macOS are either discontinued or increased in price, Apple's Cinema Display series has been discontinued more than a decade ago, and Apple's "royal" display has also been outsourced to LG's Ultrafine series due to cost reasons, until the release of the 32-inch 6K resolution Pro XDR, Apple is back in the display market, trying to seize the small high-end screen market share from the lost market.
Since for Apple, the display bowl of rice is so hard to eat, why does Apple have to go through a lot of hard work to "return" with a higher priced 7K display? In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this.
First of all, the "Studio series", or the Mac of Apple's Silicon era, needs such a display. We have said before that the M1 series of computers have encountered some "technical obstacles" in terms of graphics expansion, like this M1 chip itself how can Apple solve the problem? Yes, the chip with a powerful GPU is built into the monitor, so that the monitor "drives itself" is not good? Transferring part of the demand for graphics performance from the computer chip to the chip of the display can not only alleviate the computing pressure of the computer chip, but also alleviate the pressure of computer-side data transmission and release the bandwidth of the computer processor. When it comes to specific products, "Mac Studio" can not only promote more high-resolution displays at the same time, but also improve its own heating status, and also have more room for expansion.
On the other hand, cooperating with suppliers to launch their own brand high-end displays is actually an opportunity for Apple to "invest" in suppliers and improve the technical level of suppliers. From Apple's efforts in the field of MiniLED in recent years, it is not difficult to see that MiniLED will be Apple's preferred technology in the transition period of display technology, and MiniLED is destined to appear on more and more Apple products in the future. Launching its own brand of high-end displays can not only fill apple's gap in the field of displays, but also serve as Apple's technology accumulation. Considering that MiniLED products have higher software and hardware technical requirements for backlight design, "Studio Display" can also be used as a test field for Apple technology to pave the way for future MiniLED products.
summary
Although our analysis of the "Studio" series before the release of the new product on March 9 can only be regarded as a guess, the "Studio" series does play a pivotal role in Apple's product sequence, whether from external news or Apple's own product strategy.
On the one hand, the "Studio" series fills the gap in Apple's product matrix: "Mac Studio" is another exploration of high-performance desktop computers by Apple since the "Trash Can Mac Pro" and iMac Pro, this exploration is not only an exploration of performance, but also an exploration of product form, thanks to the new Apple Silicon, we are likely to re-examine the "Trash Can Mac Pro" in the future short-lived split motherboard, Performance computers are likely to undergo another revolution after NUC.
On the other hand, "Studio Display" also fills Apple's long-term market gap in the field of displays, not only to take back the market initiative of the display from LG, but also to reapply the technology in its own computer and tablet products, playing a role of "one screen and two uses".
But from the perspective of consumers, whether Apple can revitalize computer products with the "Studio" series, "Make Apple Great Again" is obviously still full of unknowns. LG's 27-inch 5K display is priced at nearly 10,000 yuan, Apple's first-party 32-inch 6K display is priced at nearly 40,000, and if this "Studio Display" really achieves 7K resolution, its price I dare not think. For most consumers, in the face of price, brightness, color gamut and resolution are all indicators that can be sacrificed. Unless the price is below 10,000 yuan, the market prospects of this 7K display are destined to be as "bright" as the XDR Display. The new product launch of No. 9 is also destined to become a carnival that only belongs to scientific and technological self-media like WWDC in recent years.