I had just sold my iMac but made two Time Machine backups of it before I left. I didn’t even notice until I brought the boxes into the garage. In typical Apple whimsy, the backs of the boxes showed the backs of the products. There was a pull tab and each box opened easily without tools. When I hovered over the newcomers with a box cutter, Apple had tricked me.

The 2 boxes from Apple arrived on the 18th, the release day. It totaled $4,798 plus tax, but that included the Studio Display (more on that later). I increased the hard drive to 2TB to accommodate the iMac I was trying to get rid of. My choice was the Studio with 64GB of RAM, I chose to spend the extra $200 on a 10-core CPU system with a 32-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. Another motivator was that I hated that my laptop was faster than my desktop and I really wanted to work on a bigger screen. I chose very fast as reviewers seemed to say that the M1 Max was more than enough for a landscape photographer. It came in two versions, very fast and very fast x 2. I was expecting a 27-inch iMac, but instead we got something much better: the Mac Studio. I always wondered when a desktop M1 Mac would come out. Last year I bought the 16 inch model with the M1 Max chip and loved it.

Things got better with the release of laptops with the new Apple Silicon Mac Book pros. That was too much money for me, so I sat on the iMac and hoped for better days.

Luminar neo apple m1