Kate Bergeron has seen a lot of Macs in her time. As Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering, she’s been with the company long enough for family and work milestones to become intertwined. “One of my kids is the same age as the original Mac Mini,” she explains at one point in our chat.
We’ve caught up to discuss the launch of the Mac Studio and Studio Display. Both of these products symbolise the beginning of the end for Apple’s M1 era of computing, which initially kicked off in 2020 with a pair of updated MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models before expanding throughout the entire Mac lineup. The pay-off to Apple using its own chips instead of those made by long-time partners Intel? A new standard for both raw power and energy efficiency that Windows-made computers are still struggling to catch up with. It has been a total paradigm shift for what is traditionally a sleepy area of technology.
After two decades spent at Apple, Bergeron has accumulated a few of these industry-defining stories, including the first product she worked on – the 17-inch PowerBook G4. “Way back in 2003 almost every single thing that we put in it was a new invention at the time,” she says. “Nobody made a laptop that big that you could carry at that point. They were sort of these horrible-looking seven and a half pound briefcases.”
If the legacy of that first aluminium PowerBook lives on in the MacBook Pro series that succeeded it, then the Mac Studio's lineage is similarly extensive. An all-new desktop computer made for professional movie makers, music producers and graphic designers, it’s a case of Apple flexing its pectorals for the camera with a fresh M1 Ultra chip that essentially takes the M1 Max (formerly Apple’s most powerful SoC) and fuses two of them together. If you’re the kind of person to whom editing multiple 8K video streams at the same time in Final Cut Pro or stacking hundreds of Logic Pro tracks together is a necessity, then the Studio tears through those tasks like it's Kyllian Mbappe doing the beep test. Wired called it “one hell of a computer”, while The Verge proclaimed it to be “a historic achievement”.
“We're able to offer this performance to our users in a way that we haven't before and really nobody has,” says Colleen Novielli, product marketing for Mac desktops and display at Apple. “Now we're just so excited to see what people are going to be able to do creatively.”
Aside from the sheer brute force that M1 has unlocked in Apple’s laptops, it’s also arrived at a more friendly and flexible moment for the company’s product design. Case in point, photographers and filmmakers who want to move their work from a camera’s SD card to the 2019 Mac Pro – still Apple’s most technically proficient computer – need a supplementary dongle to do so. In stark contrast, the Mac Studio has an SD card slot on its front side and sits comfortably on any workspace imaginable at just 7.7 inches wide and 3.7 inches tall.
In many ways, it’s a callback to the original Mac Mini with its charmingly small footprint and curved, boxy aesthetic. Back in 2005, achieving that cute look meant taking a big block of aluminium and then innovating within Apple’s milling process in order to carve out its insides and create a thick 5mm wall. Nowadays, that product’s polycarbonate top and bottom have evolved into a shell for the Studio that’s made from 80 per cent recycled aluminium and better aligned with Apple’s goals of carbon neutrality by 2030. “Because of the Mac’s product history, we've been able to take those products from 20 years ago that might look pretty pedestrian to us today but were groundbreaking at the time, and then learn every single little thing that we can from them,” says Bergeron.
If the Mac Studio represents a certain form of wish fulfilment for long-time Apple users – a more flexible desktop than the iMac at a more attainable price than the Mac Pro – then the Studio Display is a totally different proposition. As the company’s first sub-£4,000 monitor to be made in the past decade, its sheer existence is a result of how dramatically computing has changed of late. Just a few years ago, Apple’s answer to hybrid working was basically the iPad Pro. “Before, many people were happy with their notebook experience, because they had a desktop at work and would only work for a little bit at home,” says Novielli. “Now people want a big beautiful display on their desk.”
So as well as working hand-in-hand with the Mac Studio, the Studio Display can also be paired up with almost any other Mac to boot – as well as a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 or even a Windows laptop should you really want to Frankenstein the thing out. Really, this 5K 27-inch monitor has been designed for the home office. Plug a MacBook Pro into it via a Thunderbolt cable and it’ll recharge your laptop, while giving you a whole lot more real estate with which to fire off emails, fine-tune presentations or video edit your heart out.
Rather than leaning into Apple’s previous screen-making tropes, its flat-edged aesthetic takes its cues from 2021's redesigned iMac – banishing the old-look iMac and its famously bulbous rump to history. While that iconic aesthetic demanded flat sheets of aluminium to be bent and machined to the umpteenth degree so that they could house a necessary array of innards, the Studio Display’s build allows for far less wasted material while still supporting a welcome array of tricks. There’s an A13 Bionic chip that’s found in the current iPad, a 12MP camera for video calls and an optional tilt-and-height-adjustable stand – for £400 extra, of course.
Just as arguably the most impressive feature of last year’s new iMac was its surprisingly ample speaker array, the Studio Display’s six-speaker setup delivers similarly fulsome sound without the need for that product’s chin – a seemingly small design choice that demanded Apple’s engineers to reconfigure the screen’s entire LED backlighting setups. And it wasn’t the only quandary Bergeron and her team had to contend with.
“You could say, ‘Let's just go crank those speakers up and make them loud with lots of rich, full bass,’” she says. “If you do that in a really rigid mount, you would create a display that actually shook itself on the table. So our specialists on the audio team use a technology called force cancelling reverse where we actually offset the speakers so that when they vibrate the system is amazingly stable and totally quiet.”
Although Apple closed out its most recent March product event with a tease for an all-new Mac Pro, the Studio and Studio Display represent the last piece in the M1 puzzle for the vast majority of would-be owners. Such is the sheer quantity of M1-powered computers that Apple has made of late, even the people who make and rep these products are running out of places for them to live. Novielli describes how her office has “both a Mac Pro and an iMac”, while she uses a MacBook Pro on the go alongside another green iMac in her kitchen. Bergeron has a similarly ludicrous setup, including an orange iMac in her kitchen as well.
As much as both employees are about as likely to comment on future M2-enhanced products as they are to proclaim the virtues of a Rolex over an Apple Watch, neither seems destined to spend a lot of time looking back on the transformation that Mac has seen in the space of two short years – they’re far too immersed in an ongoing process. “I always like to reflect on the quote from Steve [Jobs] that ‘the journey is the reward,’” says Bergeron.
After a little gentle nudging, we do manage to eke some sentimentality from the Mac stalwart. Just as the PowerBook, aluminium iMac and Mac Mini came to define Apple for decades, this new era of products has the potential to do the same. “I think it'll take a little bit longer for us to fully appreciate it,” she says. “But when we're pulling the material together for the keynotes, and we're reflecting on the performance of the products that actually achieve what we set out for them to do, it can be quite overwhelming.”
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