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I'm surprised anyone was expecting an Apple 4k announcement. The tech is not affordable yet. Apple is premium, but not that premium. They're not going to release a $3,400 monitor and hype about it at their event, when only 1% of people are going to be able to afford it. The monitor will be branded Retina, and their current Retina mobile displays aren't exclusive to the 1%, regular consumers can afford them.

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Apple's 30 inch cinema display originally retailed for $3200.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/06/28Apple-Unveils-30-C...

It was a different market at the time, though. Consumer monitors didn't have the colour accuracy for photo and video professionals, and those people were accustomed to paying a _lot_ for their computers and monitors; the 30" display was going up against even more expensive things from the likes of Ilyama.

Today, it's different. 4K displays haven't (yet) become entrenched in the professional space, and a lot of graphics professionals pay much less for their computers and monitors now. And besides that group, is there really a market for a >$3000 monitor at all? I'd be surprised.

That is true, so it isn’t unprecedented, but when Apple announced that display, it also lowered the prices of its other displays to $699 and $999, which it continued selling.

I believe that if and when Apple releases a 4K display, it will not be its only offering. I expect it to be accompanied by a revamped (thinner) 27" display that supports Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, and MagSafe 2 – priced the same as the current Thunderbolt Display ($999).

Key point: "hype about it at their event".

The Seiki 39" 4K display is $700 [1]. It has some limitations (you can read all about them at Amazon), but it establishes that the $3,400 price-point set by ASUS and its ilk is quite possibly made up mostly of profit.

I contend that Seiki could outright dominate the desktop display market if they replaced their display's HDMI 1.4 with 2.0 and made the display function a little less like a television and more like a monitor (no splash screen, no speaker, no remote control, better support for ACPI). Drop some things, upgrade some others, keep the same $700 price.

A smaller offering around 32" would also be welcome, I'm sure. But the 39" model makes for a superb desktop display assuming you can be made comfortable with the 30Hz refresh rate thanks to HDMI 1.4.

[1] http://www.seikidigital.com/products/seikiPro/4k.php

>They're not going to release a $3,400 monitor and hype about it at their event, when only 1% of people are going to be able to afford it. //

You mean 1% of the 1% in the US that can afford, and still want, an Apple laptop?

Apple sold about 30 million Mac notebooks in the US in the last 4 years. Even if only half of those units were bought by unique individuals, that makes for 5 percent of the US population, a far cry from 0.1 percent.

(Background data: Apple has sold 100 million Macs in the last 4 years. 40% of those were sold in the US. Over 70% of the computers Apple sells are notebooks.)

You're saying >5% of all people in USA own a Mac notebook first sold in the last 4 years? That's quite unbelievable to me, I'm [relatively] poorer than I thought(!). Does anyone have corroborating stats on this - most pertinent I could find in a short search was that 75% of USA households have general-purpose computers (from 2011 http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf [it's probably higher now]; ~50% use smartphones apparently). Combining those two suggests that >7% of all general purpose computers in the USA are Mac notebooks.

In any case the thread concerns the Mac Pro, not sure why I said laptop. At best it would be MBP sales that were relevant.

EDIT: just found this from 2009, https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/pr...

>"[...] The NPD Group’s 2009 Household Penetration Study, approximately 12 percent of all U.S. computer owning households own an Apple computer, up from 9 percent in 2008. While Apple ownership is growing, those households are decidedly in favor of mixed system environments. Of those 12 percent, nearly 85 percent also own a Windows-based PC.

Multiple computer ownership is a common thread in Apple computer households, with 66 percent of households owning three or more computers, compared to just 29 percent of Windows PC households. Apple owning households are decidedly more mobile as well, with 72 percent of them owning a notebook, whereas only 50 percent of households that have a Windows PC own a notebook." //

That gives us 72% of 12%, ~9% of households who have an Apple computer that also have some brand of notebook.

All the numbers and percentages I used came from Apple’s financial statements. Mac sales have gone up significantly since 2009, but the NPD survey you quoted is in line with what I wrote earlier.

As for Mac Pros: of course that market is tiny. There are no official sales figures available, but I estimate that around 2 million Mac Pros were sold in the US in the last 4 years. That’s less than 1 percent of the population, but a lot more than 1 percent of 1 percent.

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