A 32" iMac made sense to me, considering the apple display. They could use the not so great panels for a new cheaper ATD and a 32" iMac. This rumour is pushing me to a 14" MBP Max instead. I really need to get rid of my trashcan pro, 15" rMBP and 12" MB now. I can see they are dropping in value every second.
I think the issue is that when a panel isn’t perfect, it’s so bad that they can’t use it for much of anything. But the way yield works on these things, as you linearly increase the area, you exponentially increase the likelihood of failure. So a 5” smaller (diagonal) display would have much higher yield, and thus be much cheaper. (The number of backlighting LEDs also goes down as O(size^2’ish), so that’s another factor).
Keep in mind that we are in the era of Apple giving us what we want (ports, no touchbar, battery life, etc.), so there’s a good chance that the cheaper standalone display really is coming. Release date makes the most sense to correspond to the new Mac Mini (which will have M1 pro/max, Plexiglass top (mac-cube-looking?), etc. But that cheaper display has to be 27” - hard to differentiate with the big display unless they do that.
Now if Apple would just start making airports again, I’d be in heaven.