Well - $1600 for the display vs. $1800 for the base 5k i5 iMac. A Mac Mini + Studio Display is $2200 c.f. $2300 for the old i7 iMac and is certainly in a similar performance ballpark - YMMV whether it's equivalent and/or whether you'd need to buy the Magic mouse/keyboard (personally, I've got enough kb/mice in my cupboard to get started and prefer 3rd party ones anyhow).
Certainly, though, I don't think the Studio Display is great value for money - the panel is an incremental improvement on what was in the iMac 5 years ago (not great if you're hoping to get 10 years out of it) and not having a second display input would be a deal-breaker for me, and the cost of a proper adjustable stand is a joke. Looks like a lot of the cost has gone into including a massive, slim-line internal power supply so it can act as a docking station for a MBP - which greatly broadens the market but is irrelevant if you're using a desktop. Same goes for the sound system - however good it is, if you're using your Mac Studio for any sort of A/V creation you'll probably have an external audio interface & monitor speakers and/or headphones which will thrash anything built into a display.
The sweet spot for a Mini/Studio is, I think, to get one or more 3rd party 4k displays. The downsides of using 4k on a Mac are somewhat exaggerated (just don't do A/B comparisons with 5k - of course 5 is better than 4) & you can get a pair of (maybe smaller) 4k displays for less than the cost of a Studio Display - plus the whole world of 32/40/50" 4k displays, OLEDs, ultra-wide etc. (I managed to snag a pair of 3:2 4k+ Mateviews before they turned into hen's teeth).
(Note to Apple: forget the iMac, forget 32" XDR, please make a 28" 3:2 display...)
True - but being realistic, user-upgradeable RAM was always going away with Apple Silicon, so if an ASi 5k iMac is a pipe dream, an ASi 5k iMac with upgradeable RAM is pure Inception dream-within-a-dream.
It was only the lowest-end 5k iMacs that were so cheap - as has been pointed out several times, a Mac Studio + Studio Display is competitive with the top-end i9 iMacs and the iMac Pro. I doubt whether Apple was ever losing money but I suspect that the higher-end Macs were balancing the lower margins on the i5s.
The original prices may also have assumed that 5k panels were going to be adopted by PCs and become a commodity - a couple of 5k displays from Dell and HP launched around the same time as the 2014 5k iMac but they sank like a stone: the need for dual displayport cables didn't help, but whereas 5k is a sweet spot for MacOS's fixed PPI UI, Windows has a fully scalable UI (there are downsides to that, of course) and works well with 4k - 5k is too small an improvement to be worth the cost and interface hassle. 27" 4k passes the "retina" test at typical desktop viewing distances. With 5k dead outside the Mac platform I guess prices are creeping up.
There are really two types of 5k iMac owner: those who bought them because they liked the all-in-one form and the 5k screen, and those who only bought them because there was no viable headless Mac available at the time. The latter group won't be looking back now there is a decent choice of Minis and Studios. That's another huge bite out of the potential 5k iMac market - the other "bites" being the much improved 24" version which will satisfy some low-end 5k customers, MacBook Pros with Mc Pro/Max chips removing the performance advantage of desktops and the need for a "semi-portable" all-in-one system, along with the general industry-wide drift towards laptops and mobiles. A range of "headless" Macs and a choice of displays (plus the third party option) will please more of the people more of the time.
I think Apple's "master plan" ~2014 was that all-in-one was the future for Mac Desktops. The TrashCan was shaping up to be a lemon, the 2014 Mac Mini refresh dumped the higher-end and server options - and neither of those systems saw an update for years afterwards. The 5k iMac looked enticing because the display was hard not to love, and remained the only viable mid/high end desktop for years. YMMV whether the 2018 Mini (better CPU but knobbled by a weaksauce Intel integrated GPU) or 2019 Mac Pro (unless you have a business case for a $10k+ machine, forget it) even changed that. I think the final nail in the "all-in-one" coffin was the Mac Studio in 2022 (maybe the M1 Mini was an unexpected success) - essentially, the "trashcan" but done right courtesy of Apple Silicon.
I have a hunch that the late 2017 iMac Pro was supposed to be the Mac Pro replacement - the famous U-turn press conference in early 2017 that reaffirmed Apple's love of "modular" systems came at a time when it's plausible they were just starting to show the iMac Pro concept to key customers/developers (and probably getting laughed at).
