[1]: HiDPI displays that work correctly with macOS' and Linux desktop's naive HiDPI implementation, that requires 2x scaling for good results.
Nobody in 2022 will sell you a monitor that does that, except for Apple's expensive stuff that is hard to use with regular PCs and one over the top Dell display. I wish everyone did what ChromeOS or modern Windows apps do. I need that extremely crisp font rendering in my life.
Laptops in the early 2010's were stuck on 1336x768 until Apple kicked up a fuss about having "retina", same with phones which had comically low resolutions until Apple made a fuss about it with the iPhone 4.
Sadly my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so I can't make a lot of use of the extra real-estate, but it always seems as if they're ahead when it comes to resolutions on consumer devices.
With proper 2x scaling as intended by Apple there is no extra screen real-estate. 5k at 2x scaling gives you the real-estate of a 2560 x 1440 display, just with a doubled pixel density and thus much sharper. This is the actual value of HiDPI display.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12568/iiyamas-prolite-xb2779q...
[2]: https://www.dell.com/ae/business/p/dell-up2715k-monitor/pd
I actually like extra wide displays. There are few interesting options like that but the rest seems to be dominated by low color, low resolution, low latency stuff.
Not just latency, but framerate too.
I wanted to build a gaming PC that would double as a Windows dev machine, so I wanted more pixels than 1080p.
Even with my 3090, I can only reasonably do 1440p @ 240Hz, and even then I lose some frames on Fortnite with graphics settings turned down. 4k was out. Thankfully Alienware makes a very nice 1440p 240Hz monitor.
I'd rather have higher density like the laptop it is connected to, with 4k. Perhaps 200dpi 3:2 or 16:10 around ~22"(56cm) diagonal that can do portrait would be my preferred monitor. Haven't seen that around unfortunately.
I could deal it being around 22" for higher density for Mac users.
It seems there's a few people in our same camp, but we haven't been heard by manufacturers yet.
Didn't Apple corner the market on these displays by buying up all available capacity for retinas?
LG, Dell, and Iiyama all made such monitors; the only survivor is the LG one. They didn't sell well, apparently.
- 60hz. For this price point I'd expect higher.
- Thunderbolt 3. Interesting that they didn't bump to 4, given the Mac Studio is Thunderbolt 4. This means you wont be able to daisy chain the displays.
- Lack of size options. Would love to see more variety here. After moving to an ultrawide format, I can't see myself moving back to standard format monitors from a productivity standpoint.
Overall though excited for this and keen to see how it'll evolve. It'll be a miss for me this cycle but keen to see their future releases of their monitor line.
DisplayPort 2.0 supports up to 77.37 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Wikipedia's DisplayPort article has excellent tables about bandwidths of display formats: HDR 5K@120hz (57 Gbit/s) is totally possible with DP 2.0.
One could use DisplayPort 2.0 alt-mode to carry that signal over a USB-C cable. With the main disadvantage that the USB ports on the monitor would drop to USB 2.0 speeds [1]. And alt-mode 2.0 is only available on the most recent hosts with USB4 ports.
[1] Native USB4 tunneling only supports DisplayPort 1.4a (for now). That's a huge flaw imo, cause falling back to alt-mode takes over the cable and blocks USB3/PCIe tunneling from working. In fact, that flaw is even present on this monitor:
> When connected to iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad Pro 11-inch (1st and 2nd generation), or iPad Air (5th generation), Studio Display USB-C ports deliver USB 2 data transfer speeds.
Those models don't support TB3 or USB4 on their USB-C port, so they have to use alt-mode with either compression or without HDR.
That is why people were hoping for it.
So this each Studio Display will require a direct connection to the laptop/desktop in order to work?
That's definitely not great.
The amount of real estate you get with 2560x1440 is fantastic, and you can actually game on it at native resolution on older gen graphics. The pixel density of 27" @ 1440p is the epitome of goldilocks. Every single pixel is just the right amount of useful.
Being able to see my screen's pixels annoys me a lot more than moving my mouse at 60 Hz.
Two 27'' displays is not an option since you can't center anything, so... three Studio displays side-to-side?
This is some alpha state product which only people who are high are going to buy.
I'm finally sitting in front of an 8k 65" screen. This gives me a nice combination of decent picel density in the center and lots of peripheral vision in which to put secondary windows, plus I can sit across the room and watch a movie on it. But every component of the ecosystem introduced problems and friction.
I have an M1 Macbook Pro on the same desk. The Macbook can't drive the 8k TV. I have a separate desktop running Windows with an nVidia GPU for that. Every component of the video ecosystem has given me friction in getting to 8k. I had to swap my $1k nVidia GPU for a different $1k nVidia GPU that wasn't any faster, to get HDMI 2.1 support. Had to use special HDMI cables, because cables that aren't specially marked as HDMI2.1 compatible don't have enough bandwidth. And then the display itself has a ridiculous postprocessing bug (I wrote about it at https://www.rtings.com/tv/discussions/IyO2wLLsNnJCMT-_/firmw...) which makes me think the firmware engineers didn't have a working 8k source to test with.
Nearly no one wants TVs for monitors, the evidence is LG's OLEDs which gamers will take 1440p ultrawides with infinitely worse picture quality over, just for the more reasonable form factor.
It has a bulky monitor stand, but an Ergotron will allow you to mount it on an arm secured to the desk with enough range to move it right to the edge of the desk. You could also mount it on the wall.
So as long as you have a wider desk, like 27" which are available at Ikea, you're good to go. With a good window manager you can do magic with this monitor.
Also feel like 27 inches is pretty small these days, for high productivity type of work. Wish Apple went for a 34 inch
Alas, macOS doesn't support any native scaling other than 100% and 200%. So if they did release e.g. a 27" 8K monitor, the text would either be too small, or they'd have to use bitmap scaling to make it bigger in which case there'd be no advantage of having an 8K monitor.
(EDIT: To clarify, all other scaling factors are done by rendering at either 100% or 200% and doing bitmap scaling up or down. By bitmap scaling 200% up up to e.g. 250%, things are bigger so that's good, but there's no extra detail being displayed, so you're wasting the resolution of your monitor. You might as well buy a cheaper monitor with fewer but larger pixels.)
I really don't understand why they don't either (a) adopt Windows' approach of allowing rendering directly to any arbitrary scale, or (b) at least introduce a 300% mode with bitmap scaling analogous to their 100% and 200% modes.
The reason Windows developers still think it might work is they have no taste and don’t care about localized UI, pixel cracks, or blurry bitmap controls.
It's definitely possible to do, although retrofitting an existing UI toolkit & ecosystem is a massive challenge.
multiple monitors on Windows with varying dpi scales is not great though, and probably can't be until some backwards compatibility promises are broken or expired.
Windows is badly broken in this regard. I bought and returned a Microsoft Surface laptop because its rendering is broken: If you display a web page containing horizontal lines (like grid lines of an HTML table) then the lines will appear to have varying thickness even though they are all set to 1px. That's crap; I couldn't believe Microsoft is shipping this. If Windows scaling is set to anything other than 100% or 200% you will have this issue. Both 150% and 300% have this issue. I have never seen such issues on a Mac.
The new 2021 MacBook Pros were such a great design and it's clear how every small thing points to them being the greatest since 2015 Pros.
For textual work, 4k is crisp enough, for gaming you can't run 8k with 120Hz as it's way too demanding and there are no content that dense, for movies or TV there are barely any content for 8k and maybe it's just for photo editors.
Having 120Hz for all the display's baseline is far more important than going beyond 4k.
Apple is all about controlling and curating the user experience. They would much rather force you into some lane than allow you to go wild configuration wise.
Everything else I could've lived with, this is a major omission :(
In my home office, I've got two monitors and a switch to flick input between a personal machine and a work machine.
At some point I actually had a TB2 only computer I wanted to KVM switch with a TB3 laptop so this weird setup made more sense then.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M74Y03E
If you have a product that you know work I'm all ears, it would make my life a lot easier.
Unexpected side effect: Two machines allow you to keep working while installing system updates, which seem to take forever nowadays.
What about the environmental impact of adding extra ports that no one is going to use?
Having more than one device connected to a display? I think that's rather common and I'd expect multiple inputs on a display from any price range.
The Studio Display is an additional $300.
I am guessing this replaces it.
Not really other alternatives out there (displays in 5k).
I like it, but I imagine some professionals would like to do what Apple's marketing images all show; buy two, maybe even three. I'd love to have one with all that stuff, but not all of them need the bells and whistles; and there's value in having all your displays be identical, especially in work that needs color calibration (not to mention, it looks nice).
So, maybe I grab one if the reviews look solid. And hopefully in the future they release a version without all that extra stuff for closer to the $1200-$1300 an LG 5K ultrafine display can be had for.
The new Studio display is expensive, but I think the features somewhat justify the price compared to the "competition".
Of course not at the level of the Apple Displays but they are really outliers in the industry.
Other companies can handle that market.
Apple's own marketing images show tons of these displays side-by-side with one-another. And that makes total sense; the M1 Ultra can run four of them IIRC. Apple customers, especially big businesses, will buy multiple of these just for the sake of them looking good next to one-another. Not unreasonable.
But what's the point of having three webcams & microphones? 18 speakers? Its just needless cost overhead; not to mention, I'm calling it here, when these things start shipping we're going to get a Verge article or something of people with dual+ displays complaining about how the webcam selection dialog in Zoom/etc is confusing because they're all ambiguously named like "Studio Display Webcam (1) (2) (3) etc". I can see it now.
I think it behooves Apple to offer one of these without all the bells & whistles. Knock $200 off the price or not, I'm not sure that's relevant; but as a secondary display, the bells & whistles actually get in the way. Its not about being a cheap dumb commodity PC compatible monitor; its just about serving what their customers are overwhelming going to want.
I was checking on some comically wide Samsung monitors however I wasn't impressed with the build quality.
I have no idea how people can work with such low pixels density, really - I’ve tried and it's just impossible.
That is clearly a gaming monitor. No-one would want to do the sort of workloads this display is aimed at on something like that.
Edit: it's also just so hard to scroll exactly to the points where the information is presented. I just mostly end up at points that are meaningless transitions... So confusing...
Weird to think that Flash handled this kind of animation seamlessly on browsers 15 years ago.
It is. Despite their investment in desktop hardware (finally!) they completely forgot how to do desktop software. Ten years ago all those animations where buttery smooth even if they were a weird custom "video" code that assembled them out of separate PNGs.
I currently have an Apple XDR Pro monitor. It's not a great monitor - it is indeed big, the outside is as cool as anything ever made, and the USB-C hub is nice. But in EVERY other way it is badly inferior to the stock 5K monitor that comes with even the cheapest 27" iMac from a few years ago. I've been wishing for just an 27" iMac monitor that I can plug into my laptop, since that's the best non-laptop monitor I've found - even contemplated building a Frankenstein one. I'm excited I can now just buy one.
- There is a noticeable (to me) brightness shift with viewing angle changes. When the monitor is on the back of my desk and displaying a flat color across the monitor, I see a noticeable gradient instead of a flat color because of different viewing angles between looking head at the center pixels vs being off axis to the side pixels.
- The adaptive brightness backlighting doesn't do a very good job. Full bright white pixels in a dark areas will be noticeable dark compared to full bright white pixels surrounded by other brighter pixels.
- If you have some bright pixels in an otherwise dark area, the backlight cell built into the monitor there noticeable brightens, putting an approximately once inch by one in halo around the bright pixels. For example, this halo shows up around the mouse cursor when moving across a black area.
- I tend to work with light text on a dark background. The monitor makes the darks too bright (from the backlight bleeding through) and the brights too dark (because the backlight around there isn't on all the way). Everything is muted. It's noticeably less contrasty, colorful and alive when used with light on light than two iMac 27"s I have had.
- Although the PPI specs are the same, there's something about the pixels on the XDR that makes them more visible and less smooth to me than on the 27.
I don't need audiophile stuff, but it's remarkable how bad the built-in AV was on the LG UltraFine. Mic quality is bad enough that I won't inflict it on my co-workers. The camera is angled too low, resulting in the top of my head usually being cut off. And the speakers go from quiet to really loud, with no in-between.
Still very cool though.
Only problem is that you'll probably need to extract a BootCamp driver to control brightness/volume, assuming one will exist for this monitor.
(well, if it supports HDR input, you'd use Window's SDR brightness to control it that way instead)
I hope they do 4k@120hz in the next version!
Plus, you can use the additional 4k display as an extended macOS display when not gaming. I mean there's never enough screen real estate.
I've still got my old 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display (a puny 2560 by 1440 pixels), which i use daily. (The convenience of built-in video/mic/USB hub, with one cable, is indispensible and more important to me than resolution, and it's been really unclear to me what else could do that with a macbook). But might be ready to upgrade to this guy.
Also for me those "add-ons" are more important than pixel density, and I'm saying this as a graphic designer. If there were a version of this with a bigger size (but with less pixel density), and maybe a more 'squared' factor, I'd jump to it without even thinking, but alas for Apple pixel density is first above everything else.
Only if you try not to look at other vendors. It doesn't offer anything fancy except the fancy pricing.
Do they exist but I'm just bad at shopping? I may be! Please help out?
Now you can buy the exact same monitor, for 1600$.
We've made a lot of progress.
If you look at reviews for just about any model of monitor released in the past 5-6 years QC has been atrocious, with dead pixels, backlight bleed, and other odd issues being commonplace, making it a challenge to get a unit that's good all around. This has been especially true for the display that this is most directly replacing (LG Ultrafine 5k).
Although, unlike other similarly effect-heavy apple landing pages I've seen in the recent past, this one doesn't appear to offer a decent alternative version when javascript is disabled, which is a disappointment.
...although fair warning it does have occasional "flickering maroon blankouts" (1-2x...3-4x per day?). AFAIK they're basically two panels side-by-side so sometimes my right-side-one will "blip" for half a second. (search flicker in the reviews/questions).
Find one you're happy with, and check the reviews! The difference between "monitor" and "TV" is massive w.r.t. latency.
Edit: to clarify I will lurk and wait until it is £200 off on Amazon one day because I don’t need it immediately.
Anyone knows what OS does the screen run ? embedded iOS ?
The Studio Display runs the full version of iOS 15.4, with the exact same build used by the iPhone and iPad , meaning that updates to the display's functionality will come as part of iOS update.
Super fragile, especially if you have the monitor on an arm and move it around a lot.
I don’t need a monitor with an embedded iPhone CPU and six speakers, I just need the panel out of an old 27” iMac that doesn’t cost more than the damned computer driving it. I can’t even get an LG UltraFine anymore, they were discontinued outside of the US ages ago.
You're in company with all the people who've said "I wish they would just make a netbook" "I wish they would just make a budget desktop" "I wish they would just make a <insert favorite product missing from Apple's lineup here>" over the past 30 years.
A 600 nit screen inside would almost be too bright for some people. I know people who already turn down their laptops because 500 is too bright. but i think its good to have the option to turn it down rather than a screen that's too dim.
It's very annoying have it next to my BenQ 4K monitor that feels so much flatter in comparison. It just makes any other monitor so boring in comparison.
Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit - or at least start releasing glossy monitors as an option, for people who don’t want to view things through an ugly grainy sparkly coating.
You're wasting the very good parts that are trackpad, cam, mic and as a secondary monitor.
sure, it may be a middle ground between the existing Pro XDR and 5K LG Ultrafine displays, but this is something that was just announced today, hence "news".
I had a 2014 RMBP with the Thunderbolt monitor and Apple wireless keyboard and mouse. Everything “just worked”. I never had any issues. I just spent my time working instead of fighting with my workstation. It was glorious.
Glad to see Apple back to form here. I’m willing to pay the premium for a complete solution.
Perhaps only spatial audio and some camera features won't be compatible with older macOS versions. Waiting for the first reviews.
I managed to get the XDR hooked up to Windows at 6K (with a very unusual cable) but you can't adjust it below max brightness so you get a sustained 1000 nits in your face at all times. Also HDR doesn't work. But gaming at 6K is cool af!
Also, this having speakers, camera, and mic is a big step up over the XDR (unfortunately for me).
Pity there isn't a version with a 24" panel as on the M1 iMac. 27" is great but it actually might be a liittle too big, but I'll live. I guess no product is ever ideal.
This may be a bit weird/niche but I care a lot about the thickness of the monitor itself, the depth of the stand and the bezel around the screen. I’d like if the object I spend 8 hours a day staring at isn’t aesthetically horrendous..
Basically instapurchased this. Now just have to wait two weeks for it to show up…
I used to have 2x 24 inch 4K monitors at work and it used to be so nice to read text at 2x scaling. Now I can’t even find any in stock.
If I just scroll down it looks horrible.
Only way I've found is by holding the down button, but seems like this is just a bad exerpience for the majority of people?
but will i be able to record an album on it? are those three-mic condenser microphones? i guess not
Apple should really stop abusing the word "Studio"
Now make the same thing, but 6880x2880 ultrawide.
- only 60hz;
- no DisplayPort/HDMI;
- anti-glare coating (I hate the blurriness of matte displays).
