Recycling is good. Just ask Apple.
After the company was repeatedly called out by Greenpeace for its poor performance on environmental issues, it began a process to expand all ways to go green, including the now familiar slide that appears at the launch of every Apple product. It shows how it was made. Does not contain recycled materials, toxic byproducts, and more. You know one.
But in recent years Apple has also become an expert in a different kind of recycling. The company has found a strategic advantage in designing an increasing amount of its hardware in-house—and then, to make the most of it, it uses that hardware over and over again in various products.
The most obvious example, at least this month, is the Apple Studio Display. It has the same center stage camera system that every current iPad model has, the same A13 processor as many iPhones and iPads, and even runs a version of iOS behind the scenes. It’s not just the display’s aluminum that’s 100 percent recyclable – most of its technology is too!
Recipe for the product
If you were Apple and you were building a 5K standalone display from scratch, would you build a product like Studio Display? Almost certainly not! Embedding an entire smartphone system-on-a-chip (with 64GB of onboard storage, no less) is more, as is running an entire mobile operating system.
But modern Apple does not make its products from scratch. Instead, it uses the technology it has to create what is needed. While Apple’s ingredients are often used to make iPhones and iPads, they are also used in other contexts.
Think late-model Intel Macs, many of which included the T2 coprocessor. That T2 was actually an Apple silicon processor, based on the A-series. Apple wasn’t ready to switch the entire Mac to its own chips yet, but it did so by incorporating its own processor, iOS software, and sensor (Touch ID!) technology to make Macs work better.
Later versions of the Intel iMac used a T2 coprocessor, which was based on Apple’s A-series processors.
Apple
Apple has been recycling its technology for some time—the interchange between the iPhone and iPad is an obvious affair—but the age of Apple silicon has taken it to a whole new level. The M1 is the all-purpose flour of chips, appearing in four Macs and three iPads so far. Following its appearance in the MacBook Pro, the M1 Max has now appeared in Mac Studio.
However, Apple’s focus on recycling shouldn’t be explained as the company’s cheap. Designing custom hardware is expensive, especially when your competition is piecing together widely available components to make your own devices. Apple has a profit margin to hit, and it’s a lot easier to do when you build a little bit of custom hardware knowing you can fit it into a half dozen products. Apple also has a limited number of engineers, and every moment they spend creating one-off technology is a moment they aren’t spending on anything else. It is efficient and smart.
Except when it isn’t.
overthinking green
When the studio display arrived last week, most reviewers kept a close eye on the display’s center stage camera. (For the record, I didn’t—in my office’s lighting environment, it worked perfectly well. And Macworld’s Roman Loyola had a similar experience.) Apple has stated that some of the camera’s image-quality issues have not changed. Issues will be addressed. In a software update, but I don’t think that will change many people’s thinking. The root of this problem is Apple’s recycling.
As someone who uses an iPad Pro with Center Stage to make Zoom and FaceTime calls, I’ve gotten used to the Center Stage camera and its quirks. What I saw on the studio display was, for better or worse, a center stage experience—it looked fine and it followed me as I moved. It didn’t look particularly bad with the 1080p camera on my iMac Pro.
But it’s all about context. A number of reviewers (many of whom spent little time using Center Stage) compared the Studio Display’s camera to a still image taken by an external 4K webcam or smartphone camera. These are not comparisons that Center Stage Camera is going to win.
While I’m a fan of Center Stage—and I hope Apple can improve the camera’s performance with software updates—I agree that this was a case where Apple considered that Apple had moved its Center Stage system to the studio. Along with the display, it was also fitted in the iPad. , And, clearly, many reviewers’ expectations were for a much better camera than the one Apple provided.
Center Stage was introduced with the iPad Pro, but it appears that Apple hasn’t really considered its use in Mac displays.
Apple
This is where Apple’s tendency to reuse its own technology could be a liability. Maybe Apple was so proud of what Center Stage Camera could do that it never questioned whether it was good enough to put in a desktop display. It’s hard to turn your back on such flamboyant technology—and then again, I love it!—and just ship a plain old boring 4K webcam. Which component is Apple going to be more excited about, the center stage fusion of the 12MP widescreen camera and clever software produced by Apple, or an off-the-rack 4K webcam part? The answer is clear. And, at least arguably, a mistake.
Or to take it a step further: Over the weekend I had dinner with a friend who told me she canceled her studio display order, not because of reports of camera quality issues, but because of the revelation That Studio Display essentially runs on that version of iOS. He was reluctant to buy what was essentially a simple product—a display—that is, in fact, overly complex, requires its own software updates and Sometimes a reboot is required,
There’s no doubt that the Studio Display is a clever product, thanks to the addition of Apple-made technology. The real question is, has all the recycled technology made it half as clever?
