Well, let’s start with considering what Apple has done for the entire photographic industry. By introducing the iMac, which is a very capable machine, at a very reasonable price, the iMac has ended up in just about every single photography studio, graphics design house, advertising agency etc, on the planet. The iMac is an awesome little machine so its understandable that they are everywhere and for those of us who were using Photoshop before the alloy iMac you might remember all the colour accuracy issues there were from clients using dodgy monitors that they had to try and colour balance themselves, but the iMac comes colour balanced and it is pretty hard to change its colour profile.
My conclusion is Apple has given the entire world a balance point for colour accuracy and now any new monitor that comes out is expected to be as close to Apple’s standard monitor’s calibration as possible. Not only is the iMac screen accurate and overly sharp at 5K, but it is also a darn fair size at 27” yet the iMac 27” comes in at a mere £2299.00. So why does Apple want £6K for its standalone 32” display? Sure, you can buy it without a stand (-£949) and without a mount (-£189) but that still makes Apples Pro Display £4,599. I’m not arguing about its brilliance, it has the latest DCI-P3 10-bit gamut range and its 6K which I haven’t seen anywhere else, but the iMac also has P3 and is the same resolution per inch yet the iMac screen could almost be considered free or given away free with the computer considering its price. If you take the price of the iMac 27” at £2,299 and subtract the Mac Mini £899 we could now argue the iMac’s screen and stand-alone costs £1400 for a 5K 27” P3 screen, now that’s value I wish I could buy. So why is Apple asking £6K for their 32” screen? It makes no sense to me.
The Mac Pro starts at £5.5k but you can spec it up to £53,000.000. Which Mac operator can afford that? So it is my conclusion that Apple has marketed their new screen for the kind of people who fly around on private jets and unfortunately there is no screen available for us poor artists right now.