The monitor stand is a complete piss take. Apple annouced their new 32" 6K resolution monitor. Proclaiming it the highest resolution on the market. Then stated its price is £4449.99! Yes that is £4.5k for just a monitor. But that doesn't include a stand. You have to buy the stand as an optional extra or the monitor is pretty useless. So you could wall mount it using their Vesa wall mount, but that's £399. Or buy the desk stand for £999.

It gets even madder. I ran the buy page for the monitor and it you want to opt for the special matt finish glass to reduce reflections, rather then the standard gloss one, that's an extra £1000. So buy the monitor, the matt glass and the stand and you won't get much change from £7000. For a monitor!

As for the M1. Apple announced it was completely abandoning Intel CPUs as they had no direct control over their future development. Remember with PPC CPUs Apple dictated their higher end development. So instead they aquired ARM technology rights and developed the M1 chip, which is actually an integrated system on a chip, with the CPU, GPU and Ram all contained in a single package. This is great for Apple from a generic consumer sales perspective, but really bad for computing. Apple's plan is for their whole range to be running on the M1 chip. This means a Mac with an M1 will have zero expansion or upgradability because the ram and gpu are built in. All you might be able to upgrade is the SSD, which is Apple proprietary. You will see the M1 in Macs, Mac Books, Air, iPad and probably future iPhones too. From a consumer product perspective for smartphones, tablets and even laptops having nearly the whole system on a single chip is a good solution for home consumer use and it dramatically reduces Apple's components and reliance on other chip manufacturers. But it is going to make Apple Macs as generic and fixed platform as a house appliance. But that's probably what most home users actually want and use. And it locks all products down even more for Apple to have full control. A fixed platform with no component variation is a dream for a company and its OS development as it didn't have to design it to work on different setups. It will be like a game console.

Of course fixed hardware would never work for pro setups which is why the next Mac Pro is using Xeon CPUs and graphics cards.

One thing I don't know much about is a new security chip that is installed on the motherboard of all new Macs. I noticed it in the Spec of both the M1 and Pro systems. Apple locking down the hardware even more?