Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

I like this announcement, because it means that there&#x27;s a manufacturing line for proper HiDPI [1] displays running in some LG factory somewhere that third party manufactures like LG&#x2F;Dell&#x2F;Iiyama can hopefully use to give us some fresh good-looking 27&quot; 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&quot; monitors anymore.<p>[1]: HiDPI displays that work correctly with macOS&#x27; and Linux desktop&#x27;s naive HiDPI implementation, that requires 2x scaling for good results.<p>Nobody in 2022 will sell you a monitor that does that, except for Apple&#x27;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.

Awesome to see them finally putting out <i>almost</i> consumer friendly pricing displays. Few things I&#x27;m disappointed about though:<p>- 60hz. For this price point I&#x27;d expect higher.<p>- Thunderbolt 3. Interesting that they didn&#x27;t bump to 4, given the Mac Studio is Thunderbolt 4. This means you wont be able to daisy chain the displays.<p>- Lack of size options. Would love to see more variety here. After moving to an ultrawide format, I can&#x27;t see myself moving back to standard format monitors from a productivity standpoint.<p>Overall though excited for this and keen to see how it&#x27;ll evolve. It&#x27;ll be a miss for me this cycle but keen to see their future releases of their monitor line.

It&#x27;s kind of ridiculous how slow the progress in screen resolutions has been. It&#x27;s disappointing that Apple is only going for 5k, not 8k; they&#x27;re well positioned to fix the ecosystem and bring high-resolution large displays to everyone, if only they tried.<p>I&#x27;m finally sitting in front of an 8k 65&quot; 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.<p>I have an M1 Macbook Pro on the same desk. The Macbook can&#x27;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&#x27;t any faster, to get HDMI 2.1 support. Had to use special HDMI cables, because cables that aren&#x27;t specially marked as HDMI2.1 compatible don&#x27;t have enough bandwidth. And then the display itself has a ridiculous postprocessing bug (I wrote about it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;tv&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;IyO2wLLsNnJCMT-_&#x2F;firmware-bug-causes-serious-image-quality-problems-at-8k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;tv&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;IyO2wLLsNnJCMT-_&#x2F;firmw...</a>) which makes me think the firmware engineers didn&#x27;t have a working 8k source to test with.

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&#x27;re not in the territory where this stuff can be included just &#x27;cause.<p>I like it, but I imagine some professionals would like to do what Apple&#x27;s marketing images all show; buy two, maybe even three. I&#x27;d love to have <i>one</i> with all that stuff, but not all of them need the bells and whistles; and there&#x27;s value in having all your displays be identical, especially in work that needs color calibration (not to mention, it looks nice).<p>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.

Would be nice to have &gt;5K resolutions to have more pixel density.<p>Alas, macOS doesn&#x27;t support any native scaling other than 100% and 200%. So if they did release e.g. a 27&quot; 8K monitor, the text would either be too small, or they&#x27;d have to use bitmap scaling to make it bigger in which case there&#x27;d be no advantage of having an 8K monitor.<p>(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&#x27;s good, but there&#x27;s no extra detail being displayed, so you&#x27;re wasting the resolution of your monitor. You might as well buy a cheaper monitor with fewer but larger pixels.)<p>I really don&#x27;t understand why they don&#x27;t either (a) adopt Windows&#x27; 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.

I wish they wouldn&#x27;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&#x27; display with a 240 Hz refresh rate, HDR 2.000 and G-Sync&#x2F;Freesync. I guess the color space coverage is not as good though, and it&#x27;s not as bright at 420 nits, though that&#x27;s more than bright enough for me.

I&#x27;ve worked off Apple Cinema displays since the &#x27;90s and Apple Studio displays before that. I am a monitor snob. I care deeply how things look.<p>I currently have an Apple XDR Pro monitor. It&#x27;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&quot; iMac from a few years ago. I&#x27;ve been wishing for just an 27&quot; iMac monitor that I can plug into my laptop, since that&#x27;s the best non-laptop monitor I&#x27;ve found - even contemplated building a Frankenstein one. I&#x27;m excited I can now just buy one.

Sadly no HDMI or DisplayPort, so can&#x27;t use it for Xbox. Sadly only 60 Hz Seems like a really gorgeous update to this old thing - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adorama.com&#x2F;lot27md5klb.html?utm_source=adl-gbase-p" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adorama.com&#x2F;lot27md5klb.html?utm_source=adl-gbas...</a><p>I hope they do 4k@120hz in the next version!

Webcam and sound aside, the display specs seems very similar to the LG Ultrafine 5k released all the way back in 2017 for $1299: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;HMUB2LL&#x2F;A&#x2F;lg-ultrafine-5k-display" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;HMUB2LL&#x2F;A&#x2F;lg-ultrafine-5k...</a><p>The Studio Display is an additional $300.

I wish Apple would use their clout to move up in size. I&#x27;ve been waiting for a nice 32&quot; monitor or larger for a while at a reasonable price. Currently using a 4K 39&quot; TV as a monitor (had to contort the settings to get the text readable, etc.) Probably has something to do with panel yields and profit, sadly (but understandably). That said (and acknowledged, I&#x27;m not generally an Apple person), I see very little reason to buy Apply monitors, from a price perspective I just don&#x27;t see them as a value and see many extremely comparable monitors that work great with Apple computers.

For all the work Apple is doing to improve their environmental impact (which I applaud) I&#x27;m completely flabbergasted as to why this is a single device monitor. It&#x27;s quite the impact on the environment to require users who have a Mac mini&#x2F;Studio and a MacBook Pro to buy two monitors (no matter how great the production chain is). Sure, you can plug&#x2F;unplug the cable, but that works so-so on a Studio with the ports on the back.<p>Everything else I could&#x27;ve lived with, this is a major omission :(

Interesting: the discontinued 27&quot; iMac was only $200 more (1599&#x2F;1799) despite containing basically an entire Mac mini.

No mention of refresh rate, so I&#x27;m assuming a 60hz panel, <i>only</i> offering usb-c and thunderbolt, no hdmi or display port, and no mention of hdr rating, or mini&#x2F;micro led backlight zones. Apple&#x27;s gonna apple i guess. People will still buy it.

$1599 isn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> as bad as I expected, actually.<p>I&#x27;ve still got my old 27&quot; Apple Thunderbolt Display (a puny 2560 by 1440 pixels), which i use daily. (The convenience of built-in video&#x2F;mic&#x2F;USB hub, with one cable, is <i>indispensible</i> and more important to me than resolution, and it&#x27;s been really unclear to me what else could do that with a macbook). But might be ready to upgrade to this guy.

Great news. I use an LG ultrawide but it took three LGs to find one that MacOS could reliably detect with a supported resolution. It was a ridiculously complicated and painful process.<p>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.<p>Glad to see Apple back to form here. I’m willing to pay the premium for a complete solution.

No 120hz listed in the tech specs, that’s gonna be jarring for people with a M1 macbook pro.

Sad that the Thunderbolt port is perpendicular to the display, like on the LG Ultrafine.<p>Super fragile, especially if you have the monitor on an arm and move it around a lot.

Is this the same LG display unit from the previous generations and used in the LG display sold seperately at one point?

Fine print: only compatible with macOS Monterey 12.3 or later.<p>Perhaps only spatial audio and some camera features won&#x27;t be compatible with older macOS versions. Waiting for the first reviews.

I wish they would just make a normal display. I’m currently using a 27” 1440p display which has some nice features, USB power delivery for single-cable video&#x2F;charging&#x2F;data, and really excellent colour accuracy, but the pixel density is just garbage compared to my MacBook. Using them both at the same time is jarring (especially since macOS dropped subpixel antialiasing. Text looks noticeably less blocky when hooked up to a Windows machine).<p>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.

The website was too much for my top of the range iPhone 12 to handle. Nice work Apple.

wow, 600 nits -- that&#x27;s bright. If you have a mac book pro you already have a screen that does 500 nits which easily lets you see the screen in the sun. If you&#x27;re inside without glare you can get away with just 250 nits. For smart phones -- the nits are typically much higher because people use them in the sun and need good visibility outside.<p>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&#x27;s too dim.

The purchase page seems really confusing compared to how they typically do things. Typically, when purchasing something like a Macbook, you select the base model and then some of the upgrades are listed at + $XXX.00. That combined with the fact that the XDR display stand cost so much, I thought they were charging and additional $1599 for the VESA adapter. I was momentarily absolutely furious until I realized that the VESA adapter is a no additional cost option.

I hope it has better Windows support than the Pro Display XDR (it won&#x27;t).<p>I managed to get the XDR hooked up to Windows at 6K (with a very unusual cable) but you can&#x27;t adjust it below max brightness so you get a sustained 1000 nits in your face at all times. Also HDR doesn&#x27;t work. But gaming at 6K is cool af!<p>Also, this having speakers, camera, and mic is a big step up over the XDR (unfortunately for me).

I&#x27;m reading this on a 27&quot; 5K imac from 2014. It&#x27;s a nice screen. But it&#x27;s eight years old now. So, what&#x27;s new?

Bummed they didn&#x27;t release a 32&quot; or 34&quot;. I really enjoy using a 34&quot; ultrawide with 3 columns of apps.

Am I missing something or is this basically the 6-7 year old LG UltraFine 5k 27” with some extra bells and whistles?

I&#x27;m so tempted, but I&#x27;ve been on 32&quot; and 34&quot; for years now, I just don&#x27;t think I could go to 27&quot; again. I am dying for a great high end monitor with charging for my laptop, integrated camera and speakers. I loved my old cinema display. I really want this, just a bit bigger.

The height adjustable stand is $400 more than just the tilt adjustable stand. Truly revolutionary.

Beautiful, I&#x27;m probably going to get it.<p>Pity there isn&#x27;t a version with a 24&quot; panel as on the M1 iMac. 27&quot; is great but it actually might be a liittle too big, but I&#x27;ll live. I guess no product is ever ideal.

Can anyone help me understand how I&#x27;d connect this to a PC? Would I need a GPU with Thunderbolt 4 or does the motherboard need Thunderbolt 4 and the PC somehow magically utilises the GPU via that motherboard display anyway?

I was waiting a long time for the release of an apple &quot;Pro Motion&quot; display and again they disappointed. There is no reason why they are not offering an ultra wide with 120+hz and retina. They are apple. They don&#x27;t need standards to be ready because they control the whole chain and create their own standards. Steve Jobs never would have let them release that display with only 60hz. It&#x27;s the same panel I&#x27;m looking at for almost 10 years (in different iMacs). I think about giving up on retina and going ultrawide with high refresh.

Finally an AR coating on a monitor without the grainy sparkly look! I bought 3 highly rated monitors last year and returned all but one because the anti reflective coatings were visually distracting and made the screen look dirty and unsharp. The one I kept still has the effect, but to an “acceptable” degree relative to the others and I was tired of returning monitors.<p>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.

Unfortunately I bought an LG 4k display from Apple last year (or was it the year before?) for home office work so it&#x27;ll be a tough sell to buy something new, but this solves a couple of my problems with my home office setup, namely having to put in headphones with a mic for every video call since I use my Mac in clamshell mode, and having an external webcam mounted on my monitor. This is very close to &quot;one cable to rule them all&quot; setup. Maybe I&#x27;ll just have to save some of my allowance for a bit :P

Oh sure, they put the anti-reflective coating on the device that lives inside on a desk, but the portable stuff all has super reflective surfaces making them hell to use outside.

As a person who works on a Mac but uses a Windows PC for gaming: a pity this only has USB-C inputs, so you won&#x27;t be able to connect a PC with an RTX 30xx card to it.<p>Still very cool though.

I’m happy that they finally released this monitor, it felt weird that you could get an imac which was sleeker than any existing screen, but does anyone know of more affordable alternatives?<p>This may be a bit weird&#x2F;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..

I&#x27;m disappointed with the ergonomics of it. First, you have to pay extra for height adjustability, and then the height adjustment is via an arm that changes the viewing distance when you adjust the height. Why can&#x27;t it just be like Dell monitors (and many others) where the screen can be moved up or down on a fixed axis, and it&#x27;s included in the product?

Any mentions of the refresh rate? I&#x27;ve been waiting for a 4K&#x2F;5K display that supports 120 Hz to pair nicely with my 2021 MBP, but it looks like the only available options so far are funky gaming displays: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonsky.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;monitors-mac&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonsky.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;monitors-mac&#x2F;</a>

Sold. Been waiting for this for years.<p>Edit: to clarify I will lurk and wait until it is £200 off on Amazon one day because I don’t need it immediately.

No direct ICC profile is a terrible decision by Apple. Same with Apple Pro Display XDR. It’s opposite of being pro.

So happy they finally made this. Ever since I got my first retina MacBook Pro a decade ago, I’ve wanted a good companion display for it. The LG UltraFine worked, but was never good. Iiyama and the other knock-offs were worse.<p>Basically instapurchased this. Now just have to wait two weeks for it to show up…

No 12Hz is so unfortunate. Hopefully the next Pro Display XDR will have ProMotion, at the very least.

Why have 5K displays not caught on ? 4K 27 inch is fairly affordable but you have to use 1.5x scaling and it doesn’t look good at all on Windows.<p>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.

Most of the features announced are quite nice but strangely (for an Apple product), the primary feature being the display is simply not. As far as I can tell, it doesn&#x27;t even have 120 hz let alone a good local dimming implementation.

How are these websites supposed to be viewed? Never understood.<p>If I just scroll down it looks horrible.<p>Only way I&#x27;ve found is by holding the down button, but seems like this is just a bad exerpience for the majority of people?

&gt; studio-quality three-mic array<p>but will i be able to record an album on it? are those three-mic condenser microphones? i guess not<p>Apple should really stop abusing the word &quot;Studio&quot;

I don&#x27;t have much to say on the monitor, but that experience reminded me that Apple&#x27;s web design sensibilities are atrocious.

Are people really paying 1.6k for a 60hz monitor?

Glad that Apple is finally back in the game of making monitors that don&#x27;t cost $6k.<p>Now make the same thing, but 6880x2880 ultrawide.

Guys I’m thinking of buying it: WILL I BE ABLE TO CONNECT MY XBOX TO IT? This question is super important to me. Thanks!

Do you guys know if I connect two of the Studio Display will the speakers work as a stereo audio system.

I can’t even see the monitor when I click.

Why buy a Pro display when you can buy and use 3 of 27&quot; at the same time for the same price.

Anyone know how the display quality on this stacks up to LG&#x27;s ultra-fine 5k display?

Sadly no built in KVM. I like my BenQ monitor for having KVM (among other reasons).

Thank you, Apple, but no:<p>- only 60hz;<p>- no DisplayPort&#x2F;HDMI;<p>- anti-glare coating (I hate the blurriness of matte displays).

it says &quot;Powered by Apple silicon. The A13 Bionic chip enables innovative Studio Display features like Center Stage, Spatial Audio, and “Hey Siri.”&quot;<p>Anyone knows what OS does the screen run ? embedded iOS ?

How thick are those bezels?

A few years ago I would have been very excited about this, and immediately upgraded the Thunderbolt Display I had at the time. These days I prefer 32&quot; display, and I don&#x27;t even need 4k (I have 2 32&quot; QHD LG displays at both home and work)

I would get 5K display if it is 35-40&quot;, 27&quot; - no way

Wow that&#x27;s a painful website... 5 seconds in and I&#x27;ve scrolled to the bottom as fast as possible to get past the fluffy marketing bullshit, in the hope that there were some tech specs of some sort there, then left...

I wonder if this will work with Linux or Windows.

How is this news? Apple has had the exact specs (27 in, 5K res) available since something like 5-7 years ago, both as a stand-alone monitor and as an iMac.

The website doesn&#x27;t scroll properly

I realize that as a staunch Linux user I&#x27;m not in their target demographic, but... wow that website is slightly motion sickness inducing. Is it as bad to scroll through this on a mac as it is on linux? I use a mouse with an actual wheel, maybe they don&#x27;t optimize for that kind of legacy device...?<p>Edit: it&#x27;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...

I hate this trend in ‘ultra modern’ websites with the infinite scroll pulling you through some sort of animation. The website is near unusable as a result.