Only months earlier, it had introduced the 27″ LED Cinema Display for $999, describing it as a “perfect fit with our powerful new Mac Pro.” By July 2011, it released the improved Thunderbolt Display at the same price.īut if there was any question that Tim Cook’s Apple isn’t looking to save its customers money, it’s been answered by this week’s tone-deaf announcement of a $999 “Pro Stand” accessory for its latest professional monitor, which, as none of its customers would have guessed beforehand, ships without a stand. But what might superficially seem like a linear progression from selling $666 motherboards out of a garage to hawking $17,000 gold watches in shopping malls has actually been a much less orderly transition - and one that at times has gone in completely different directions.Ĭonsider, for a moment, Apple’s January 2005 introduction of the $99 iPod shuffle, which helped Apple win millions of new budget-conscious customers, and its September 2010 release of the fourth iPod shuffle - a complete music player for $49. If you’ve followed Apple for a while, you probably know that the company has spent decades evolving from a personal computer maker to a luxury retailer that outpaces diamond vendor Tiffany & Co.

Selling a monitor without a stand seems like madness, but if Apple included the Pro Stand and bumped the XDR's price by $1,000, anyone who instead wanted to wall-mount their monitor – which, given that a lot of Mac Pros are going to end up in editing suites and the like, could be quite a proportion of the market – would be rightly annoyed at being charged for an unwanted high-end stand.Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23. But hey, that's Apple we suspect that this would be an inelegant solution in its view. Of course, what Apple could have done is ship the XDR with a basic stand like the one on an iMac, with the Pro Stand as an optional extra. We've had a bit of a look around, though, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of VESA stand that looks as good or works anything like as nicely as the Pro Stand does. If you're not sold on the Pro Stand then there is of course another option: the $199 VESA mount that you can use to attach your Pro Display XDR to the wall mount or desk stand of your choice. Still, though, selling a $5,000 monitor that doesn't have a stand at all feels like a bit of a misfire. And they're probably going to go on and on about it.

So, we suspect that, as with so much other Apple kit in the past, once the Pro Stand's out there and people get to play with it, they're going to love it.

999 apple monitor stand