So I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do. Two weeks ago, right after Apple's "Peek Performance" event, I put in an order for a Mac Studio: the M1 Max config, 32GB unified memory, 1TB storage, $2,399 before tax. My 2017 iMac has been wheezing through Lightroom exports for about a year now and I finally snapped. The Studio Display I talked myself out of, mostly because $1,599 for a monitor still feels insane to me even now, but the computer itself I clicked "buy" on without much hesitation.
Anyway. My shipping estimate has quietly slipped twice this week, and I think I know why, and it's not really about me at all.
Shenzhen went into lockdown a little over a week ago because of a COVID outbreak, and that city is not some minor manufacturing town. Its the place where a huge chunk of the world's electronics actually get assembled. Foxconn runs massive campuses there, the ones that build iPhones and a lot of other Apple hardware, and they had to halt production when the city locked down. From what I've read they've gotten some lines moving again under a "closed loop" setup, workers basically living on-site so they don't have to cross the cordon, but it's obviously not running at full capacity. And Shenzhen isn't the only city dealing with this right now: there's been a wave of Omicron cases moving through several Chinese manufacturing hubs this month, which is a very different situation than what most of us in the US have been dealing with the last couple months as things loosen up here.
I don't want to overstate this. Nobody's iPhone production has stopped cold, and my Mac Studio delay so far is measured in days, not months. But it's a good reminder of something people mostly forget until it bites them: almost everything with a logic board in it, from your laptop to your kid's game console to the router sitting under your desk, funnels through a genuinely tiny number of factories in a genuinely tiny number of cities. We spent two years hearing about chip shortages and container ships stuck outside Long Beach, and I think a lot of us assumed that once vaccines were widespread the supply chain stuff would just sort itself out. It hasn't, not really. It's just moved around to different chokepoints.
What gets me is how invisible this all is until you're personally waiting on something. I wasn't tracking Shenzhen COVID numbers before this week, obviously. Now I've got a Foxconn news alert set up like some kind of lunatic, checking it the same way I used to check flight status pages. That's a little embarrassing to admit but I think it's honest, and honestly probably true for a lot of people reading this who ordered anything electronic in the last two weeks.
The other thing worth saying is that this whole cluster of Apple hardware — the Mac Studio, the redesigned iPhone SE with 5G, the new iPad Air running on the M1 chip — all got announced within the same twenty minutes at that event, and all of it presumably draws on overlapping supplier lines. So a slowdown in one place doesn't just dent one product, it ripples across the whole lineup at once. I have a friend who ordered the new iPad Air the same day I ordered the Studio and hers hasn't budged in the tracker at all, so who knows, maybe it's not as connected as I'm assuming and I'm just impatient.
I'll say this too: I don't think this is a crisis, and I'm annoyed at how quickly tech coverage jumps to "supply chain apocalypse" framing over what might genuinely just be a week or two of friction. My computer will show up. The world will not run out of iPhones. But I do think it's a decent little snapshot of how fragile the whole system still is, two full years into all this, and how a lockdown in one city most Americans couldn't point to on a map can nudge a delivery date on my kitchen counter tracking page from "March 25" to "sometime in April, we'll let you know."
In the meantime the iMac soldiers on. Its fans sound like a small aircraft taking off whenever I export more than about six RAW files at once, and I've made my peace with that for now. Mac Studio, whenever you get here, I'll be ready.