One takeaway from Apple’s Peek Performance event this week: the Mac is increasingly a platform for pros.

After years of pros feeling ignored by the company, that’s a heck of an about-face. But Apple’s delivered a slew of impressively powerful Macs: the iMac Pro, the new Mac Pro, redesigned MacBook Pros, and so on.

But when the dust from this week’s event cleared, I found myself wondering about the space between the low-end consumer offerings and those computers aimed at professionals1—or rather, the lack thereof, especially on the desktop.

If you’re someone looking to pick up an affordable desktop Mac just for some basic tasks—browsing, email, light media creation—you’ve got two pretty solid options: the M1-powered Mac mini, which starts at $699, and the M1-powered iMac starting at $1299 (or, to get one with a comparable GPU as the mini, the $1499 model).

Meanwhile, those looking for more power now have the option of the $1999 or $3999 Mac Studio models, or the $5999 Intel Mac Pro—none of which, of course, include a display. The Mac Studio packs a punch with the M1 Max chip that was, until this week, the most powerful chip ever put in a Mac.…