The Mac Studio is myth fulfillment

Apple's announcement of the Mac Studio on Tuesday may have fulfilled a dream that some Mac users have had for a long time. There is a modular desktop Mac that is more powerful than the Mac mini without the high price tag.

Being a Mac nerd used to mean using a Power Mac. The arrival of the original iMac in 1998 was greeted with enthusiasm by Mac nerds because it meant that Steve Jobs might be able to restore Apple to greatness after it foundered in the 90s.

The product line was simplified when Jobs returned to Apple. The desktop Power Mac disappeared in 1998. The choices were limited to the underpowered iMac and the Power Mac/Mac Pro tower on the other side.

For Mac power users, it was a desert. There was a mythical Mac minitower like the Power Macs of old, rising out of the desert. The creature was called the xMac.

Range anxiety for computers

It's hard to say when and where the grumblings about Apple's lack of a mid-range Mac desktop started, but they're at least 20 years old. John Siracusa wrote a 2005 post about it being found in the Mac forums in 2001 or earlier.

The community of Mac users who felt trapped between the iMac and the larger and more expensive Power Mac tower was created by the discontinuation of the desktop Power Mac. They were upset about the new Apple hardware on the Internet forums.

The Mac mini gave a clearer focus for the frustration. Siracusa rejected the Mac mini as too limited to be a proper alternative to an expensive Power Mac, and expressed his desire for an affordable modular Mac.

Here’s what I want. Start with a choice of two possible CPUs: the very fastest single CPU Apple sells, and the second-fastest. In contemporary terms, these would both be dual core CPUs. The internal expansion buses should also be top-of-the-line, but with less capacity than the Power Mac.... The build-to-order options must span the entire range for each item that can be configured.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the xMac. My xMac. The Mac that I want to buy. Reduced to one sentence, it’s a completely configurable, headless Mac that trades expandability for reduced size and cost.

[...] but I’d be happy with a compromise: a completely configurable headless Mac that trades expandability for reduced size and cost. Call it the Power Mac mini, make it cheaper and faster than at least one Power Mac model, and give the “deluxe” version the fastest available single CPU. That’d still cannibalize some Power Mac sales, but it’d also present an opportunity to up-sell iMac and (especially) Mac mini customers. It could still be a net win.

Siracusa was happy to trade away expandability, but it was impossible for many users to not want a modular PC-style Mac. In 2007, Dan Frakes wrote an article about a mid-range desktop Mac, and while he was very enthusiastic about the prospect, he also made a point about the fallacy of the whole thing.

The reality of the computer market is that the proportion of people who actually upgrade their computers beyond adding RAM is quite small. But at the same time, many of the people who will never upgrade their computers still think they’ll upgrade their computers—or at least want the security and comfort of knowing that they could.

The truth hurts. Despite the fact that 95 percent of vehicle trips are less than 30 miles, buyers of electric cars will prioritize range and charging networks. Computer upgrade anxiety existed before EV range anxiety.

Image: Apple

The concept of upgradeable tech has been completely eliminated by the last two decades. Theprocessor, memory, storage, andGPU are what current Macs will have forever. Only the Mac Pro is upgradeable. When it transitions to Apple Silicon, how much of that will remain? The evidence so far suggests that it will be little to nothing.

Photo by Jason Snell

What should an xMac fan do? A lot of them tried to build custom Intel PCs that could be used to install macOS. Psystar tried to sell minitowers directly to consumers, but they were sued by Apple.

The same year, Macworld's Rob Griffiths explained his building of aFrankenmac, a synonym for Hackintosh.

Mac users wanted something more. Macworld magazine devoted five physical pages to a story about buying a Psystar clone and building a Hackintosh in order to create a Mac that Apple refused to make.

The Hackintosh community is still alive and well, and there are still videos showing you how to make one. The Hackintosh era is going to be coming to a close in the next few years because of the Mac's move away from Intel.

2013 Mac Pro: Everybody loses

In 2012 the devotees of the xMac got excited when Tim Cook replied to an email from an Apple customer named Franz and told him that a new Mac Pro was due in late 2013 The tooth of the old Mac Pro was long. This was a chance for Apple to rethink the idea of a desktop Mac.

Frakes provided an updated list of requests for the xMac, citing the huge price gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. Frakes found that the Mac Pro was only for pros.

Photo by The Verge

The Mac Pro did not please the xMac crowd, it lacked real internal expandability and had serious thermal problems, leading to a mea culpa from Apple, which promised to do better when it released the next version of the Mac Pro. The version that was shipped in late last year starts at $6,000.

The waste of a good screen

For the last couple of decades, the iMac has been the product that straddles the divide between Mac mini and Mac Pro. Forced to buy something, a lot of the xMac's have ended up buying iMacs. I would argue that the iMac was forced to support high-end chips and other features that overcomplicated what was supposed to be a friendly consumer all-in-one. The M1 iMac is a return to form with its simple design and bright colors.

The waste of that perfectly good display has always annoyed many xMac proponents. If you upgrade your computer every two or three years, it means you are tossing out a perfectly good screen. It seems wasteful. Target Display Mode was a feature that allowed you to use an iMac as a dumb external display.

Image: Apple

The company's first new sub-$5,000 display in more than a decade was announced with the announcement of the Mac Studio. You can swap out your computer for a new one in a couple of years if you buy a Mac Studio and a separate display. If you already have a display handy, you are sitting pretty.

Is it a big money saver? Possibly. Is it more efficient? Yes, a small amount. It fills at least part of the requirements for being an xMac.

Requiem for the xMac

A funny thing happened on the way to the xMac, the world moved along and left the dream behind. John Siracusa said it was a long time before the Mac Studio arrived.

The Intel-based Mac Pro doesn't have swappable banks of RAM or storage bays. Siracusa said this past week that Apple gets a huge benefit from the fact that they can upgrade RAM. The memory is very fast.

It can be difficult to let go of the desire to tinker with the internals of a computer, because the benefits of a modern, integrated Mac might be worth the PC equivalent of range anxiety. It is difficult to fight human nature.

If you look past it, you can see that Apple is selling a computer that is powerful enough to please power users, but not at $6,000. There are still holes in the lineup that might need to be filled by a more powerful Mac mini, but the decades-long desire for power users to buy a desktop Mac in between the Mac mini and Mac Pro has finally fulfilled.

The ex-Macworld editor and xMac fan, Rob Griffiths, bought a Mac studio this week. There is a desert in the Mac desktop. It is not a mirage anymore.