A $999 monitor stand is everything wrong with Apple today

This is a dumb article.<p>The only reason they even broke out the pricing like this is because the target audience is media production houses in Hollywood and other high budget environments where they already have their own rigs and mounts. It’s just a line item on an invoice. This monitor is competing against $25k+ reference displays. And the price is <i>very competitive</i>.<p>The only difference here is that no other company does large scale press events for products meant for such a niche professional audience.<p>MKBHD said it best in his video. If Apple had said “This is a $6k monitor” and then during configuration time provided a stand-less option for $1k less, then we wouldn’t see any of these dumb articles.<p>This is everything that is wrong with journalism today.

The rise of Apple computers latest era started with the ad campaign &quot;I&#x27;m a Mac&#x2F;I&#x27;m a PC&quot; which made computing choices a cultural signal, mocking PC users as stodgy and out of touch corporate types. It worked.<p>The timing is right where a computer manufacturer with a solid build at a reasonable price could play this same strategy against Apple. I&#x27;m thinking an ad campaign which pokes fun at Apple at being over priced and pretentious, with out of touch super fans paying thousands for a basic laptop and accessories.<p>The cornerstone of the campaign could be this image:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amp.businessinsider.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;5cf8133011e2051fb46d510d-1334-1000.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amp.businessinsider.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;5cf8133011e2051fb46d5...</a><p>Disclaimer: Writing this comment from a Macbook Pro.

So much noise about the stand. This is the stand of a $5000 monitor, not just any stand.<p>Any random piece of plastic on a Porsche is more expensive than on a Ford. That shouldn&#x27;t be the case in a perfect world, but we don&#x27;t live in a perfect world.<p>People have complained for years that Apple is no pro enough. The Mac Pro and XDR display are so pro-level that the vast majority of the WWDC public was not the target demographic either.<p>Is it too expensive? Yes. Does that matter? No, it&#x27;s only because it has an Apple badge that we hear about this at all, and people entitlement with Apple is just off the charts.

Yes, the people who sit in $1,000 Aeron chairs with $10,000 workstations hooked up to $42,000 monitors and $5,000 speakers (each) in $100,000 - $1,000,000 studios working on movies and songs that make $100,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 each are going to be so pissed off about this atrocious pricing.

Is the monitor actually in the same category as existing &quot;reference&quot; monitors that cost 5 figures?<p>If the answer to that is yes, then the fundamental mistake is presenting the monitor at a show watched by consumers. Because that&#x27;s just a recipe for bafflement and mismatched expectations.

It is very expensive. But it&#x27;s based on the tried-and-tested Apple pricing approach: as high as the target customer will jump. I assume Apple is trying to milk large business customers for all they&#x27;re worth, it is the “pro” market after all. The $800 saving by going for the VESA mount is peanuts compared to the overall cost of a fully-configured Mac Pro setup.

I think it&#x27;s a misrepresented discount. Like, most pros have VESA mounts already. So they discount the monitor... So you don&#x27;t have to pay for it if you don&#x27;t need it.<p>But the message about that reason is not there and therefore it <i>sounds</i> like nickel and diming.<p>Instead we should consider it as:<p>$6000 for the monitor with stand OR $5200 for the monitor with VESA mount

The truth is... anyone who&#x27;s complaining about the cost of the optional stand, can&#x27;t afford to buy the monitor anyway.<p>I somehow don&#x27;t think this monitor was designed for viewing and editing iMovie videos. Completely different market.

Yeah decorate it with $29 iPod socks then call us back.<p>The critique of Apple&#x27;s &quot;design over usefulness&quot; is older than the Internet. I read this exact same article after the iMac dropped the floppy drive.

i own a dell monitor. it comes with the same type of stand, having the same functionalities. and it came with the monitor.<p>what is so different about apple’s monitor stand that warrants $1k?

As Linus from LinusTechTips pointed out, if they had just bundled the whole thing for 6k with an option to buy the monitor alone for 5k (thus &quot;saving&quot; 1k) people would probably be less angry.<p>I don&#x27;t really see the point of getting angry however: for once Apple is trying to charge 1k$ extra for a thing that you don&#x27;t really need and that you can easily and happily live without.<p>Just use a compatible one that you can get for like $100 or less off Amazon.

There are tripods that cost way more than this, professional equipment has a markup, justified or not.<p>It&#x27;s funny how so many people are complaining about something they were never going to buy anyways.<p>At some level it is Apple&#x27;s fault, they were marketing the &quot;Pro&quot; line to general public for so long that somehow they have set an expectation which makes no sense.

I have a question.<p>Is the $999 stand a media deflection strategy for a rather mundane WWDC or something else? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;highlights-from-wwdc-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;highlights-from-wwdc-...</a>

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m going to buy one but here is a thing: Is it made of Aluminum or other expansive metal?<p>I bought a desk with Aluminum legs. The legs were empty from the inside. The desk was already expensive comparing to the standard model (It was custom made, I asked for the Alu legs). I asked the manufacturing guy why the legs were not full and he laughed. He said the price will be astronomical if they were full and that the metal is very expensive.<p>I forgot the price but it was definitively over $1,000. The non-Alu version was less than half.<p>So depending on the metal and heaviness of the stand, Apple might not be overcharging on this one.

Ironically on an Oath website demanding privacy opt outs to continue.<p>Could HN alert people to these sites, change T&amp;C to remove them?

If it seems expensive, it’s not for you.<p>Although I am disappointed that Apple hasn’t made a display for “the rest of us”. I’d love an Apple monitor instead of the LG ones but without all the stuff only high end video pros need. Maybe they’ll do one after everyone buys the 6k version already.

On the actual monitor side you don’t seem to have much competition on this category. If you want large screen with high DPI, the only ”massmarket” option seems to be the couple of years old Dell 32” 8K display which sells for like $4k.<p>Seems to be all the 5k displays have been discontinued.

It&#x27;s funny how monitor stands can cost more then the monitor itself, but it&#x27;s relatively cheap if it can prevent back&#x2F;neck pain.

Let&#x27;s wait and see their sales reports and then we&#x27;ll see who&#x27;s wrong.

I wonder how many people complaining about the price of the stand, is even considering buying the monitor. My point is, why to complain about something I&#x27;m not going to buy anyway.

Wait, I thought people on Reddit were joking about the 1k price tag

I was very tempted to buy a MacBook Pro last year. If the keyboards would actually work, it would have been pretty much perfect except for the price. I have no experience with the touch bar, but it didn&#x27;t look so bad in the store.<p>I hope they can fix the keyboard issues...<p>(Just to make a counterpoint to the &quot;everything Apple does sucks&quot; tone of the article)