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.
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)
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I wish Apple would use their clout to move up in size. I've been waiting for a nice 32" monitor or larger for a while at a reasonable price. Currently using a 4K 39" 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'm not generally an Apple person), I see very little reason to buy Apply monitors, from a price perspective I just don'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'm completely flabbergasted as to why this is a single device monitor. It's quite the impact on the environment to require users who have a Mac mini/Studio and a MacBook Pro to buy two monitors (no matter how great the production chain is).
Sure, you can plug/unplug the cable, but that works so-so on a Studio with the ports on the back.
Everything else I could've lived with, this is a major omission :(
No mention of refresh rate, so I'm assuming a 60hz panel, only offering usb-c and thunderbolt, no hdmi or display port, and no mention of hdr rating, or mini/micro led backlight zones. Apple's gonna apple i guess. People will still buy it.
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.
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.
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.
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/charging/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).
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.
[+] [-] DCKing|4 years ago|reply
[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.
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] radicaldreamer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] digisign|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mywittyname|4 years ago|reply
Didn't Apple corner the market on these displays by buying up all available capacity for retinas?
[+] [-] orangecat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyuenho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
LG, Dell, and Iiyama all made such monitors; the only survivor is the LG one. They didn't sell well, apparently.
[+] [-] tomc1985|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|4 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] owenwil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fotta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oceanplexian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aldanor|4 years ago|reply
Two 27'' displays is not an option since you can't center anything, so... three Studio displays side-to-side?
[+] [-] mekster|4 years ago|reply
This is some alpha state product which only people who are high are going to buy.
[+] [-] meerita|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimrandomh|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] risho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoorishBears|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adam_arthur|4 years ago|reply
Also feel like 27 inches is pretty small these days, for high productivity type of work. Wish Apple went for a 34 inch
[+] [-] pedrocr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanmancan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillingeffect|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 015a|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adrianmsmith|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] astrange|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] petilon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pcr910303|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copperx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deergomoo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tedivm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danielvf|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skadamat|4 years ago|reply
I hope they do 4k@120hz in the next version!
[+] [-] minimaxir|4 years ago|reply
The Studio Display is an additional $300.
[+] [-] LocalPCGuy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techpression|4 years ago|reply
Everything else I could've lived with, this is a major omission :(
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mulmen|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] valine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|4 years ago|reply
Super fragile, especially if you have the monitor on an arm and move it around a lot.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joao|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps only spatial audio and some camera features won't be compatible with older macOS versions. Waiting for the first reviews.
[+] [-] deergomoo|4 years ago|reply
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.