Apple's Studio Display has as much storage as its new iPad Air

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Studio Display Lifestyle
Studio Display Lifestyle (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Apple's new Studio Display ships with 64GB of storage.
  • Only a fraction of the 64GB of available storage is being used.
  • All of the storage is likely required for future software updates.

Apple's hot new Studio Display comes with as much storage as a base model iPad Air, although it isn't actually using a great deal of it.

The new 27-inch Studio Display went on sale last week alongside the new iPad Air but it turns out that the two have more in common than you might think. Like the fact that they both ship with 64GB of storage. Amazingly, the best Mac display for most people right now has as much storage as some iPhones did not too long ago!

The news was first shared by developer Khaos Tian on Twitter, with a full 64GB clearly visible — although it's notable that a fraction of that is being used right now — there is plenty of room for growth, to be sure.

Quite why a display needs so much storage isn't immediately obvious, although one possibility is to give it enough space for software updates. The Studio Display ships with Apple silicon inside — an A13, to be precise — and that requires a version of iOS to function. We know that Apple is already working on a software update that will fix the problematic webcam performance and that will surely come in the form of an update that will use at least a portion of that 64GB of storage.

In the same breath, however, this should perhaps not be all that surprising. As Rene Ritchie notes, the internals of the Studio Display are very similar to that of the current iPad, all the way down to that A13 Bionic and associated 64GB of storage. Apple has been making that chip for a number of years now and we can only imagine how cheap it has become to build since its introduction.

That being said, and given Apple was putting just 64GB of storage in its flagship iPhones not that long ago, it's still surprising to see so much in a display. And if you're buying a new iPad Air today, maybe take this as a good example of why you might need more breathing room for your new tablet.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.