I like this announcement, because it means that there's a manufacturing line for proper HiDPI [1] displays running in some LG factory somewhere that third party manufactures like LG/Dell/Iiyama can hopefully use to give us some fresh good-looking 27" 5K desktop monitors. It boggles my mind how little attention very high pixel density displays have been getting from PC display manufacturers. I would also be first in line for a PC monitor that uses the M1 iMac display, but I suppose nobody sees a market for higher end 24" monitors anymore.
[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.
Apple have always been the first to push higher resolution devices for as long as I've been alive.
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.
The ThinkPad R50p had a QXGA screen (2048x1536) option back in 2003. Granted Windows had zilch support for it which is probably why it died. Even the base model was a 1600x1200 screen. And there was plenty of phones with 200+ ppi before the iPhone 4. I think it has more to do with higher PPI screens getting cheaper and Apple could just get more supply first...
> 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.
I bought a mac during this period and I have a distinct memory of having to choose between a 1080p laptop or a much lower resolution mac. MBPr has a leap forwards but I mean laptops that WEREN'T Apple's at Apple's price range had already moved on from 1336x768.
They've had the iMac line using these displays forever and it hasn't filtered down to other display makers. Only LG via the ultrafine line has used these densities (also Windows and Linux support is lacking or janky)
Iiyama [1], Dell [2] and LG used a 27" 5K iMac display for a little while, but as production at Apple wound down you can no longer really buy those in most places.
A portion of that could be related to lack of protocol support. 5k at 60Hz is more bandwidth that HDMI or DisplayPort could provide until very recently. Apple got around it by essentially making it two separate displays bound together in software using a single Thunderbolt cable, but that is only really feasible when you control the entire ecosystem.
The PC market seems to be driven by the gamers and the word on the gamers street is that it's all about latency.
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.
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.
Once you get used to low-latency or high-refresh-rate displays, you can't not notice the subtle mouse cursor drag of a "early days" 4K display (had one at work), or the teeny delay of (most) Dell monitors. Honestly considered at asome point just asking work to get me a high-Hz display.
I have a 24"(61cm) 4k Dell monitor with Ubuntu... it is a bit unique these days, don't think there are many others around. Mostly happy with it, but...
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 made this comment elsewhere, but all I really want is a 96x2 PPI monitor because I'm mainly on Windows and that's what widgets look their best at. 24", 3840x2560 (for 96 x 2 PPI, 3:2 aspect ratio), 120Hz, 10 bits per color, topping out bandwidth at exactly two lanes of UHBR 20 (or four lanes of UHBR10) of DisplayPort 2.0 would be my holy grail.
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.
There was an LG Ultrafine 21.5" 4k display which was the same DPI as the MacBook's screen, but it's been long discontinued (along with that model of the iMac, which was what the display was originally destined for)
I've been searching for those, but they're unobtanium even second hand. I suppose no-one wants to get rid of these monitors once they have them, because there's no replacements you can buy.
Yes. My desktop is using a janky 5k display with dozens of dead subpixels, and still it was the best option available at the time (and it now seems to be discontinued). It's impressive how the supposedly diverse PC ecosystem completely fails to deliver in certain areas; see also reasonably sized Android phones.
This is likely a mini-LED screen that Apple has been putting into the iPad Pro and MBPs, which is not a technology LG possesses. This is likely manufactured in Taiwan or China or Germany, using the licensed technology from Taiwan's Epistar.
There is no evidence for that. It is more than likely an LG display, as Apple has been rumored to work be working with LG on Apple branded displays, and they are the only producer (so far) of 27 inch 5K displays.
> I like this announcement, because it means that there's a manufacturing line for proper HiDPI [1] displays running in some LG factory somewhere that third party manufactures like LG/Dell/Iiyama can hopefully use to give us some fresh good-looking 27" 5K desktop monitors.
LG, Dell, and Iiyama all made such monitors; the only survivor is the LG one. They didn't sell well, apparently.
Personally it's still too much of a hassle dealing with HiDPI on Windows, especially if you mix with regular DPI displays. They also seem like overkill. I don't know about you but 1440p at 27" is the perfect DPI for me
Awesome to see them finally putting out almost consumer friendly pricing displays. Few things I'm disappointed about though:
- 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.
Samsung has 5120x1440 @ 240hz today. That is literally half of a 5K panel at double the speed. It amazes me how many people I've seen say this exact same thing about how 5k120hz is impossible.
TB4 has the same bandwidth as TB3 so you wouldn't be able to daisy chain 5k monitors anyway. Also as the other commentator mentioned, TB doesn't have enough bandwidth for 120hz (53Gbps vs 40Gbps)
Try doing your same math with the Pro Display XDR or the Samsung Odyssey G9 and your calculations will come up with the monitors being impossible especially accounting for overhead. 5k120hz is very possible with today's tech, you just need to use DSC or 2 links.
Yeah I don’t know what it is with everyone prioritizing pixels over refresh rate.. once you start using 100+hz 60hz starts to feel like a slide show. You can see mouse trails and scrolling is jerky and uncoordinated, it’s painful and insanely distracting.
I mainly just look at text all day, so the "slow" transitions between different bits of text just don't matter all that much to me. Resolution helps that text look nice and crisp though, which I really do appreciate.
To this day, 27" 1440p, 144hz IPS gaming monitors are still my favorite daily driver for any desktop productivity. And when I say favorite, I mean by an extremely large margin.
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.
Although I agree that 100+ Hz matters and the difference is huge, pixels density is very important also, and for some (myself included), it matters more.
I don't know what it is with everyone claiming a 60 HZ panel is unusable. Movies are in 24Hz and people panic if you make them 60Hz because it's too smooth for them, but somehow 60Hz isn't enough to browse the web?
Being able to see my screen's pixels annoys me a lot more than moving my mouse at 60 Hz.
I've been running an LG non-curved 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor as my main work monitor for several years now. It's a great form factor, but the resolution is really sad. It's essentially a wider version of the Dell 1440p monitor that I had ten years ago. My ideal monitor now would be a pixel-doubled version of this ultrawide monitor, but I'm still tempted to lose the extra width and upgrade to this 5k display.
Yeap. Same dilema here, splitting in two or three when coding doesn't look good in my LG 27" 4k monitor. Is either full screen or nothing. For the case, instead of buying 2 32" apple pro monitors buying 3 of the 27 would make it better.
It's kind of ridiculous how slow the progress in screen resolutions has been. It's disappointing that Apple is only going for 5k, not 8k; they're well positioned to fix the ecosystem and bring high-resolution large displays to everyone, if only they tried.
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.
maybe i'm just old and blind but i can BARELY even notice the difference between 1440p and 4k if i very explicitly and intentionally look for it let alone the difference between 5k and 8k. this seems like so beyond unnecessary that it's absurd. i might be able to be convinced that you could notice on your 8k 65 inch tv if you were standing right in front of it, but on a 27 inch display that seems incredibly unlikely to me. also what world do we live in where a resolution that is literally above 4k isn't considered high resolution.
I sit 2ft from the 8k screen; it fills much more of my peripheral vision than most people's monitors do, and I position most things in the middle and never full-screen anything. Think of it like a multimonitor setup without the seams between monitors.
Are you talking about for watching video? In that case I'm with you, but for text (using it as a computer monitor as the OP is) the difference is night and day.
I have a 1440p 31 inch screen from which I seat about 1m away, and while it's finer than my previous 1080p one, In text or other fine features I can still notice the pixel boundaries. I would expect to notice them up to about 5k at this distance, but anything more would probably just be feel-good-ness rather than actual measurable difference, for me at least.
Depends on the screen size. On a 22" screen, the difference between 4k and 1440p equates to 200dpi and 133dpi respectively - if you can't see the difference between 200dpi and 133dpi, I'm sorry, but you have either poor eyesight or glasses aren't doing their job.
This 5k 27" screens blows your 8k 65" screen out if the water at any reasonable viewing distance for a computer monitor...
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.
I use a 48" 4k 120hz HDR LG OLED. It's by far the best electronic purchase I've ever made in terms of productivity and entertainment.
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.
Setting the 8K screen farther away so it fills the same field of view will make it strictly better than the smaller 5K if you can manage it. Same view, more angular resolution and your eyes are focused farther away which reduces eye strain.
I'm more annoyed by slow progress in refresh rates. Resolutions have progressed pretty nicely IMO, but the top end monitors from Dell, Apple etc still all running at 60hz.
Also feel like 27 inches is pretty small these days, for high productivity type of work. Wish Apple went for a 34 inch
I've seen this sentiment a lot but it doesn't track with my experience. 4K@60Hz is now common and very cheap (<300€ for an LG IPS 27'' screen). It definitely wasn't just a few years ago, people even bought weird 4k@30Hz screens as a compromise. 5K is an intermediate step most manufacturers didn't bother with and we're getting 8K now at which point we've pretty much maxed out human vision for almost all applications. As far as I can tell we live in the future and nobody is happy. Maybe it is because very high end screens did 4K and 5K early and stopped there for a while because at that price it was a niche. Meanwhile all the innovation has been on making the cheaper ones reach that same level.
The key feature is "HDMI 2.1 display stream compression", which is only present in very recent GPUs, and without which a computer can't output 8k at all. If it's new enough to have that feature, it's fast enough to handle 8k no problem. I don't typically run videogames at 8k, but I'm sitting close enough that I want them centered in a ~4k window anyways rather than filling my peripheral vision.
For me, its frustrating to not see an option without all the webcam, microphone, octuple speaker array, A13, 100w charging, TB hub, madness. I have to imagine that adds significant cost, and at $1600 we're not in the territory where this stuff can be included just 'cause.
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.
Except if you compare it to the LG 5K, it's worth the extra cost in build quality alone. The LG monitors are notorious pieces of junk with flaky connectors that come loose like clockwork.
The new Studio display is expensive, but I think the features somewhat justify the price compared to the "competition".
My personal take: my two 27" 4K LG monitors run GREAT here. I like the extremely small vertical bezels on both of them (one is a 144Hz and the other is a 60Hz). Connectors are fine. The monitors don't move at all, so build quality issues are imperceptible here. I think I paid something like $600 for each one at different points in time.
I’ve had 5 ultra fines since they were released in 2016/15ish, both 3x4k 21.5”, and now 2x5k 27”. Never experienced any issues, build quality is quite high in my opinion and the stand is surprisingly solid, much better then my Dell UltraSharps and LG UltraWide.
Of course not at the level of the Apple Displays but they are really outliers in the industry.
Apple is not interested in releasing a cheap dumb commodity PC-compatible monitor and never will be. It just doesn't make sense for them. For a lot of reasons.
I don't feel that's a reasonable take, in this case.
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.
Would be nice to have >5K resolutions to have more pixel density.
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.
Your suggestion was tried for years and failed every time because it doesn’t work. HiDPI shipped because it was 2x or nothing. (Later there was 3x.)
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.
Android has been shipping arbitrary DPI support for longer than iOS or MacOS has supported the limited 2x HiDPI, and it doesn't have the issues you're talking about.
It's definitely possible to do, although retrofitting an existing UI toolkit & ecosystem is a massive challenge.
nah, hidpi on Windows is fine if you know what you're doing as an application developer. it's those who haven't bothered to make the changes recommended or required that make windows hidpi support look worse than it is in single-monitor setups.
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.
> I really don't understand why they don't either (a) adopt Windows' approach of allowing rendering directly to any arbitrary scale
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.
Macs does support non-integer scaling. In fact, macOS currently ships non-integer scaling by default in certain MBP models. It gets criticized from time to tome, though the newer 14/16” MBPs ship 200% as default again.
Unless things changed since last I checked ~2 years ago, macOS’s 150% scaling actually renders at 300% and downscales. It looks pretty bad (visible aliasing on any kind of text) and is wasteful performance-wise.
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.
> (a) adopt Windows' approach of allowing any arbitrary scale
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.
I wish they wouldn't make me scroll through two pages of animated backgrounds just to see the actual monitor. That said if I would spend this much on a monitor I would prefer the Samsung Odyssey Neo, which has a 5K resolution on a curved 49' display with a 240 Hz refresh rate, HDR 2.000 and G-Sync/Freesync. I guess the color space coverage is not as good though, and it's not as bright at 420 nits, though that's more than bright enough for me.
The 300 nits brightness kills this model for me. With my desk sitting next to a window, even with indirect sunlight anything below 400-500 nits starts having usability issues. I could lower the shades but I'd much rather let the sunlight in.
I have several Dell monitors (writing this on a 27' 4k S2721QS), they're absolutely awesome for office work. Sometimes I crave for a higher refresh rate though, I have another ultrawide monitor with 144 Hz refresh rate and it really makes a difference, I find.
I learned a long time ago to hit "Tech Specs" on the top right instead of sitting through the ridiculous marketing pages (especially since they have awful performance on Firefox for some reason).
I've worked off Apple Cinema displays since the '90s and Apple Studio displays before that. I am a monitor snob. I care deeply how things look.
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.
Just to be clear, the XDR is not a _terrible_ monitor. It's certainly better than a random $200 monitor. Most people in the world wouldn't notice the following issues.
- 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'm not the OP but I've had an XDR for about a month now, which replaced a 27" LG UltraFine 5K (same panel as the one used on 27" iMac for years). My issue with the XDR is the lack of built-in camera, mic, and speakers that are serviceable for zoom calls.
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.
Can you actually connect HDMI input to a thunderbolt only display? I have the LG 5K thunderbolt-only display and cannot use it with a desktop PC due to this issue.
You'd still use a 5k display in a non-native 4k resolution (surely the xbox doesn't support higher resolutions?), which might be ok for video and most games, but it's not a good solution. I'd just get a half decent, affrodable 27" / 4k display for gaming and keep the Studio display for actual work.
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.
Readit News
[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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.