Memory and storage configurations, together with pricing for the New Mac Minis (M6/M5 Pro) and Mac Studios (M5 Max/M5 Ultra) were announced by Apple today.
I have been waiting on the new Studio machines, as I am a couple of years past the amortisation of my current Mac, and I had previously harboured a faint hope that Apple might continue to serve professional users with a machine that would allow some degree of upgradability. Given the lack of development of the Mac Pro platform for over a decade, it was no real surprise that they sunsetted it earlier this year.
My current Mac is an Apple Macbook Pro M1 Max with all the tick boxes and was a holding pattern choice while I waited to see what Apple did with their desktop lineup. It's a powerful laptop and reflects my strategy of always building in headroom - it's a machine entirely capable of dealing with the bloated releases and increasing demands of applications from the likes of Adobe and Apple's own iOS.
But it's hard to find the words to describe just how obscene the pricing has become. Inflation yes, and I appreciate that DRAM and NAND are competing for capacity, so they suffer the same economic weather but I'm old enough to remember the PowerPC era of professional Macintosh computers. The Halcyon days when you could buy an upgradeable workstation and extend the life of the machine through PCI graphics card updates or through supplemental memory.
Looking at memory options for the Studio machine, there are only two configuration choices. The jump to 256GB from 96GB is substantial. In economic terms, £4,000. I dread to think what the cost of 512GB is but I assume a further £4,000 but knowing Apple, it'll be £5,000. Apple call this 'unified' memory and while I understand the hardware architecture and form factor requirements that drives this, I don't believe for a minute that the design decision was not driven by commercial intent. 'Unified memory' is an insidious practice where you are forced into forecasting your endpoint at purchase versus being able to electively upgrade to extend the life of the machine or in line with your changing computer demands.
Prior to this questionable practice, Apple were at it before with memory configurations (around the time of DDR if I recall) where they left no vacant chip slots to upgrade. Every slot of your configuration came filled with the cheapest divisible unit of memory relative to your specification. So the only economical path to more memory was to buy it at the outset. Apple knew this.
Unified memory is the typical silvery-tongued reframing I've come to expect of the brand who love to tell us that things are millimetres thin versus what had always been the standard convention – thickness. But then 'soldered to the motherboard to prevent you upgrading' isn't quite so poetic.
The second bite from Apple is UK pricing. UK and US pricing is on numeric parity and while it's not a true comparison - UK retail is mandated to feature prices with VAT, there is still a 10-15% differential after you factor relevant sales tax and cross rates.
Maybe I'll wait until the M6 appears in the Studio machine and buy the Studio Ultra Max Pro Max Ultra which makes my wallet even thinner. Did I mention that you don't get a screen or even a keyboard for a £12,500 spend?
