Apple Event: 'Peek performance' was for 'ultra' people

Apple stops pretending it's for everyone

In a surprisingly muted event, Tim Cook aims his pitch at elite users.

It was not the briefest event Apple has ever held; that distinction goes to 2021's 50-minute unintentional self-parody. But at a mere 58 minutes, the "peek performance" unveiling was all business, without so much as a $19 cloth or a Craig Federighi dad joke to make us chuckle and/or roll our eyes.

Gone were the themes of the past: no hymn to California; no 420 references; barely any zooming in, out or around the dystopian Apple spaceship. CEO Tim Cook has previously opened these videos by briefly acknowledging the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. In 2022, any mention of important events in the wider world had to be inferred from his clothes (Ukrainian flag colors, if you happened to spot his yellow Apple Watch wristband) or found in his tweets (where Cook mentioned International Women's Day, to the chagrin of some users).

In place of those attempts to make Apple look like it stands for and is accessible to everyone, we got a series of pitches that aimed a blizzard of buzzwords directly at elite users. Can't afford the eye-watering price tags on these high-powered products? Don't worry, they're not for you — especially not if the phrase "new M1 chip" doesn't make you salivate.

For starters, there was time enough for Cook to open the event talking about Apple TV+, but crowd-pleasing series like Ted Lasso were barely mentioned. Cook wanted to focus on the award-nominated movies on the platform, which makes sense given that members of the Academy are filling out their Oscar ballots as we speak. This is Apple doing its "for your consideration" advertising for the LA crowd.

The majority of the event was given to the new Mac Studio, a bulked-up Mac Mini (or slimmed-down Mac Pro), which starts at $3,999 for the M1 Ultra version. There's a $1,999 version with the M1 Max chip, but Apple spent much of its time hyping the Ultra version — which, it boasted, can play back 18 streams of 8K video at once. You might wonder who needs that many simultaneous streams. It's a game changer for artists, app engineers, musicians, and video producers, Apple said, showcasing each of these creative types in their own minimalist and perfectly manicured houses.

If you're in these groups, you have permission to get excited — especially if you have an extra $1,599 to shell out on the new 27-inch studio display. (Which, bafflingly, showcased its 5K resolution, even though Apple has given us 5K since its 2014 iMac.) And you could spend as much as $8,000 on your Mac Studio setup before you even get to the monitor. This isn't exactly computing for the masses.

So yes, the Mac Studio is powered by the newer, faster M1 Ultra chip. That means Apple's M1 lineup starts with the Max, continues with the Pro, and has reached its ultimate form (for now) in the Ultra. Just to confuse the non-techies even further, the M1 Ultra is two M1 Maxes stuck together. It's double maximum power! I can't have been the only viewer to have pictured a Spinal Tap guitarist adding an "11" to his amp's volume.

Apple's crack marketing team could have solved the confusion by naming the higher-powered chips M2 and M3 respectively; presumably that doesn't sound high-powered enough. There's a kind of fetishizing of the M1 architecture at play here. The ad for the Studio drove this home by featuring a tiny designer exploring the box like it was some vast and terrifying alien artifact out to kill her; the twist is that she was asleep at her desk the whole time. Mac Studio: for any nightmare creative project that causes sleep deprivation and fears that technology is out to get you.

To be fair, there were two upgrades announced to Apple's more plebeian products. Its cheapest iPhone, the SE, entered its third generation — one that happens to bump up the price to $429. That upgrade was all under the hood, with a new A15 bionic chip and 5G capability for those lucky few whose carriers have turned on 5G service in their areas.

Plus, the iPad Air entered its fifth generation with its new M1 chip; it's priced from $599 to $899, not counting the smart keyboard and second-generation Pencil that the event tried hard to upsell us on. Like the iPad Pro, which can be maxed out with such bells and whistles at more than $2,300, the iPad Air may be the company's best machine when it comes to walking out of the Apple Store with way less money in your wallet than you expected.

It's no surprise that this $2.5 trillion company knows how to raise its prices and sell you peripherals, of course. Apple products have long counted as aspirational luxury items. What Tuesday's event suggests, however, is that the company is done playing to anyone but its relatively wealthy tech-obsessed base. And for that level of honesty — and brevity — we should be grateful.

UPDATE: Mar. 8, 2022, 11:59 a.m. AEDT The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the new iPhone SE will be available in the just-announced forest green colour. This is not the case. Mashable regrets the error, and also that Tim Cook won't let those of us on a budget have nice things.

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