The iMac competes via its 5K display and having macOS in general. Remember that Apple’s comparable offerings for this tier display were priced at $1299, in the same price range as many 5K displays.
The $1800 price point isn’t hard to grasp once you consider the display.
EDIT: I previously compared to / referenced possibly sub-$1000 5K monitors, but it seems the ones I was looking at in that range were actually 4K.
It’s like buying a 5k display and getting a subsidized computer. There’s ~1 5k monitor on the market today (LG)?
I wonder how expandable this is? Buy the bottom end machine with the CPU you want and upgrade SSD and RAM? I would imagine SSD is upgradeable but RAM soldered onto the mobo?
On Apple laptops "SSDs" are also soldered PCIe flash memory chips or something like that, so maybe on this very thin desktop computer they will also be doing that.
and it's interesting, hard to find a 5k "retina"; was looking at this, but other than the hard to find (these days) LG model, everything from the usual suspects (dell, etc) gives you some gigantic screen at a lesser DPI...
