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't be able to connect a PC with an RTX 30xx card to it.
It most likely wouldn't work with a Windows PC anyways due to the tight macOS integration anyways; my iMac in Boot Camp can't use any of the USB-C ports on a connected LG Ultrafine 5k at all.
Wow! Didn't know those cables can go the other direction as well. That's huge!
Thank you! Another example that writing something wrong on the internet is the best way to find the truth :)
That said, it looks like there's just one input port and three output ports. Would need to do some hack there as well, to avoid constant cable changing.
Several Intel and AMD motherboards have both Thunderbolt ports along with a DisplayPort in port that lets you pipe the output of a discrete GPU (like an RTX 3080) through the Thunderbolt connection. These will probably work just fine with the Studio display. Some PC laptops with Thunderbolt and more capable GPUs probably work with it too.
There are bidirectional DisplayPort <-> USB-C cables, as well as DisplayPort+USB-A -> USB-C cables/adapters that work with the XDR display at 6k, or there are PCIe cards that add a USB-C port with DisplayPort alt-mode support
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)
Amazingly, NVidia cards had this port on previous generation models, but it got removed for some reason. (Though it's actually not clear to me it would work; they did some non-standard stuff to get USB 3.1 instead of USB 2.0 alongside DisplayPort lanes.)
Assuming this is the same panel as in the 5k iMac, it's a good panel. It doesn't matter that it's old. What matters is that it works, and that you can actually buy it. There are very few high res displays on the market.
It would be nice if it cost less than 1000€, but I guess you can't have everything.
I hardly notice when switching between my M1Pro monitor and larger 27" monitor. Sure my monitor do support 144Hz, but im running it at 60Hz... because docking station
I disagree completely. My main monitor is at 144hz, and it's very jarring to switch to my (slightly older) MBP running at 60hz. Not having high refresh rate means this new monitor won't ever be on my short list.
I feel that while changing from 30hz to 60hz and the latter feels smooth (enough). Never used a higher refresh rate device but wonder how much more can this keep going and humans noticing.
Having used displays from 30Hz to 300Hz, I believe 120Hz vs 60Hz is easily noticeable for anyone who is aware of the differences. Higher than that is a steep point of diminishing returns in my experience.
There's a good reason for this: Thunderbolt 4 doesn't have enough port bandwidth. TB4 can carry a max of 30Gbps but 5K @ 120hz is 32Gbps. There's no way Apple would do two cables for this, and the next gen of Thunderbolt is a while off, so the choice makes sense.
Doesn't display stream compression support higher bitrates? Also, I think thunberbolt 4 supports DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0, which can handle up to like 80Gbps. But I guess that comes at the cost of attaching any other devices other than the monitor.
Running a program with fixed-rate 60hz (a lot of games) would cause judder. It's the same sort of reason they don't do 150% scaling; you want integer multiples of the "low-fi" version so that you can upscale without artifacting.
DisplayPort 1.4 (which TB3/TB4 support as an alternate mode) has enough bandwidth for 5k at up to 144Hz using display stream compression (which Apple already uses for the Pro Display XDR): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Refresh_frequency_...
Whatever Apple is doing for the XDR (which I own) is not DSC, or not standard.
Because DSC has been broken ever since the Big Sur betas. Catalina supported 1.4 and DSC and my cheese grater Mac Pro happily drove 2x27" 4K monitors in HDR @ 144Hz.
Big Sur? Nope, you get 95Hz SDR or 60Hz HDR. If you set the monitors to DP1.2 you get 120Hz SDR.
Any mentions of the refresh rate? I've been waiting for a 4K/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: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors-mac/
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't even have 120 hz let alone a good local dimming implementation.
Benq's is pretty good but whoever stuck those checkbox-filling speakers into the design is making a cruel joke at everyone else's expense. I get better sound out of my phone. Way, way better sound.
True, there are QA issues reported with it. (FWIW I've had mine since 2017 and only starting to hit random connectivity issues now, but 5 years isn't a bad run for a heavily-used monitor)
Yeah there was no mention of local dimming or refresh rate so it seems more like a refresh of that display with the new Apple design. Though for refresh rate I kind of understand since I don't think there are any 5k 120hz displays on the market. I also noticed that it only has a single thunderbolt port, so I'm not sure if you can daisy chain the displays. Even just adding local dimming would have been a huge difference maker but it likely would cannibalize the Pro Display XDR sales.
No webcam or microphone in the LG displays. Well the 4k at least. I assume the 5k is the same. It does have speakers. They're ok for the price point but not notable. It's also basically unsupported as far as software is concerned. You can't connect an iPad to it for example. Or at least I can't anymore. Sound would play but not screen mirroring.
Interesting. Thanks for the info. I guess I should have been less lazy and just looked that up before posting. When I was looking at both the 4k and 5k it was completely lost on me that it had those features. Dang! I don't need 5k (or 4k really but w/e) but would have liked to have had the webcam and mic.
For these types of displays - you shouldn't really ever be using the stand that it comes with anyway. Monitor arms are ubiquitous and known. They do much better job of holding a monitor than the stands that come with most monitors.
That's a "you are holding it wrong" kinda argument. If you pay 1.5k for a monitor you should be able to expect a stand that doesn't shake if you bump into your table a bit.
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.
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.
The thing is, for most people a glossy monitor with an AR coating is a good compromise, since reflections are a lot more distracting than a slightly matte finish. For a studio monitor this isn't a consideration, but in general the finish is mentioned in the specifications.
The problem is, some monitors aren’t “slightly matte” - many are very matte, and you can’t tell just how matte they are into you receive them, since the finish is always just called “matte”.
Glossy isn’t ideal but I’d definitely take it over spending $500 on a 4K ultra sharp display only to view everything through a fine layer of grainy rainbow colored dust.
Apple’s nano-matte technology seems like it could be a wonderful albeit expensive compromise, but I know I and many others are willing to pay the premium.
I realize that as a staunch Linux user I'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't optimize for that kind of legacy device...?
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...
> Is it as bad to scroll through this on a mac as it is on linux
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.
FYI the Studio Display website was outsourced to an agency, and not developed in-house by Apple engineers. Outsourcing rarely improves the quality of software.
I don't think (for me) the issue is how smooth the scrolling is. It's the fact that these animations are there at all. Like... who wants to see these? They add nothing and add huge visual confusion...
I feel like everyone immediately realized what a terrible UX scrolljacking provides when the trend started, but Apple has pressed on despite their (in my opinion) otherwise thoughtful UX design.
If you middle-click and scroll down smoothly, it's a better experience (provided you nail the right speed). However, there's a bunch of text you miss doing it that way.
Mac pointing devices have step-less and inertial scrolling, so the scrolling itself is effortless, but the framerate of the "video" is too low, so it's either not fluid enough unless you scroll like crazy.
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.
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.
Graphics cards that can output 5K60 over a single DisplayPort cable out of the box have been available since mid 2016. If anything, availability of HiDPI PC monitors has gone down since then.
Looking at the uproar over at Reddit, it seems like people care far more about refresh rate than resolution or color depth. This also seems to be borne out by the current monitor market - most monitors seem to be 1440p high-refresh rate monitors.
The vast majority of people with 120hz+ displays do not play video games. They're standard in mid-range TVs. They're standard in mid to high-end phones. They're standard in high end tablets. Gamers are a minority of the 120hz panel market. They're certainly also a minority of the people discussing this panel on reddit, 5k is too high resolution for gaming and 120hz is too slow, people weren't wanting a 5k120hz panel to play games, they wanted it for productivity and at most to play games on the side.
Low refresh rate is bad for pros for the same reason it's bad for gamers, it makes it harder to quickly and accurately perceive things in motion and it slows down your ability to accurately execute inputs. I feel the effects of the reality distortion field has caused everybody to believe that quite simply no real professionals could dislike working on 60hz LCDs and the disappointment is all caused by all those silly gamers.
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.
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.
Do you mean the AW2721D from 2020? If so, I was looking to purchase one myself.
How color accurate is the screen?
How well does it handle HDR?
Does it ever get blurry?
If you've ever tried run Linux, either bare or VM, did it handle dpi correctly?
I haven't tested for color accuracy or HDR. No Linux. Does not get "blurry" while I'm gaming.
My only recent comparisons are my new 16" M1 MBP and my 1440p Dell U2719 monitor (provided by work). Colors are wildly better than the Dell (of course) and it seems close to the MBP, although the MBP looks better out of the box of course.
At time of purchase, the only viable 240Hz 1440p options were this Alienware or the Samsung Odyssey G7. The Alienware offered better latency, and it was 40% off on the Dell website for some reason, so that's the one I went with.
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.
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...
Random cheapo laptop: 1366x..
One better: apple
Even better: higher priced laptop had 1920x.... Oh, and those had IPS displays unlike apple with (halfway decent) TN panels.
So everybody else pushed, then apple not only caught up but jumped ahead. And now they are again behind with 3k vs 4k and 5k vs 8k and miniled vs oled with the same order: cheap < apple < expensive.
Same for the macbook air/ultrabook form factor: Invented by Sony but only got popular once apple jumped on the train years later.
Apple is really good at "sherlocking" and getting out a polished/well-integrated version of something that has been around for years and making it popular.
Of course macOS supports these higher resolutions but there’s also the color calibration and support for wider color gamuts other than sRGB and having that all integrated together.
For example, the iMac had Display P3 (a color space 50% bigger than RGB) support starting in 2015.
And Apple still hasn't shipped a laptop with a higher refresh rate than 120hz when competitors have been shipping 144 or even 240hz for years (A 100% bigger value than 120hz!).
In games with fast motion, 120hz vs 240hz is easily perceptible (outside first person shooters it’s not good to provide much value). I would be fine with 120hz for desktop work, but 60hz displays has been a gripe of mine about Macs for a long time. 120+hz was available on CRTs 25 years ago…
I can see benefits even while scrolling a webpage or moving windows around. It's very confortable.
This been said, I can remember CRTs at 60hz with side scrollers and demos at 60fps with perfect image stability while scrolling. You could read tiny texts scrolling up and down perfectly. This is not the case anymore with LCD panels...
Try to read a webpage while scrolling, impossible.
60hz or 120hz I would pay for a stable image in motion. It would bring tremendous confort.
IMAX did tests back in the day with footage of a baseball being pitched directly at the camera. They found that the intensity of emotional response tailed off after 60hz. It's not that the higher frame rate isn't perceptible, but that raising the frame rate doesn't really have any appreciable impact unless people expect higher frame rates.
There's a notable difference between passively consumed content and interactive content.
We're fine with 24FPS for films and tv shows, but try that for an FPS and it's considered nigh unplayable. I remember when the line was "the human eye can't see past 30FPS" now it's at 60. The treadmill keeps going.
Apple doesn't ship stuff just because it's available; there has to be some appreciable value.
Faster refresh doesn't necessarily mean a better display. I suspect Apple's displays are higher quality than most competitors even if they max out at 120Hz.
Here are the specs for the latest MacBook Pros:
16.2-inch (diagonal) Liquid Retina XDR display;1 3456-by-2234 native
resolution at 254 pixels per inch
XDR (Extreme Dynamic Range)
1,000,000:1 contrast ratio
XDR brightness: 1000 nits sustained full-screen, 1600 nits peak2 (HDR content only)
SDR brightness: 500 nits
1 billion colors
Wide color (P3)
True Tone technology
Refresh rates
ProMotion technology for adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz
Fixed refresh rates: 47.95Hz, 48.00Hz, 50.00Hz, 59.94Hz, 60.00Hz
352 × 416 pixels at 2.1" is about 259 pixels per inch.
When introducing the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said the number of pixels needed for a Retina display is about 300 PPI for a device held 10 to 12 inches from the eye.
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.
> 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 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'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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
However this decision does mean Apple can't produce monitors with more than about 200 PPI without the text being too small (at 200%). i.e. they can't go beyond 5K at 27".
Which is a shame, you can use 8K monitors with Windows at e.g. 300% just fine.
They can easily add support for rendering at 3x. iOS has supported that since iPhone 6 Plus. The only thing that's missing from macOS is a switch to turn it on, and produce all the UI assets at 3x.
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 upgraded from 2015 13" Macbook Pro to 2021 14" Macbook Pro, and it's remarkable how similar the devices are. The physical dimensions are almost identical. Neither have a touch bar. And they both have a similar selection of ports (HDMI, SD card, aux, mag safe), and in very similar locations. The difference is basically improvements in quality of pretty much everything: better screen resolution and size, better webcam, better keyboard, better speakers, USB-C instead of thunderbolt ports and USB-A, better battery life, and of course a much much faster processor and thermals.
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.
As far as I know, it's worse, it renders at 200% and downscales.
macOS draws only at 1x or 2x. 3x is iOS only.
Apples decision to support only integer scaling was what allowed them to adopt Retina displays very quickly. Unfortunately it led to a subotimal solution in the long term.
> (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.
Personally, no, but the GP did say "allowing any arbitrary scale" and that's what I was referring to. Why Apple does not allow 150% is beyond me because it is quite reasonable. But I can understand why they don't allow users to enter a value like 168%.
> Why Apple does not allow 150% is beyond me because it is quite reasonable.
It is absolutely not reasonable. HTML tables with horizontal grid lines will appear to have varying line thicknesses when in reality they are all set to the same width.
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.
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.
>nah, hidpi on Windows is fine…
Exactly, it’s fine.
Apple has never settled for “fine” either it’s great or it gets cuts at some point.
>if you know what you’re doing as an application developer.
Apple also tends to avoid wading into footgun waters to keep quality (for 3rd party devs) as high as possible across the board.
> nah, hidpi on Windows is fine if you know what you're doing as an application developer.
Many (most?) don't or can't be bothered so the end result in practice is that it doesn't work. Microsoft has been chasing the HiDPI fairy for decades and the situation hasn't really gotten better. They still ship software (both in and outside the OS) that isn't HiDPI aware.
Retina prioritizes making it easy for developers to adopt: Double the size of artwork, points are 2 pixels, Done. Are there quibbles? Sure. But millions of people are looking at HiDPI screens where every single thing in the OS and all third party apps they use fully support 2x.
No one lives in the magical world where arbitrary scaling factors are supported. Doing that as a developer is just too damn complicated when @1x + @2x (and maybe @3x) makes 98% of people happy and is vastly less work.
> Microsoft has been chasing the HiDPI fairy for decades and the situation hasn't really gotten better.
Well, I want to say it has gotten better. Their Metro design is what a UI has to look like to work with arbitrary scales and still solve those problems I mentioned. The downsides are it uses simple geometric shapes and has tons of whitespace everywhere so text can reflow in longer languages.
This is probably another big reason behind “flat design” in modern websites, the old skuomorphic (sp) stuff would be hard to do with vectors.
(As for vectors in UI, they have other performance issues which are important if you like live resizing windows.)
The vast majority of apps on modern Windows (10+) just works. I've been running all kinds of weird scaling factors like 175% for the past several years with no issues.
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.
Isn't the Android SDK older than iOS? Either way, it can't escape blurriness. There's bitmaps on this very page and if I zoom in the reply button misrenders.
Actually it can't escape pixel cracks either, as I seem to remember OpenGL ES 1.0 including GL_LINES where the default width is 1px.
Androids pixels are display pixels, there's no post-render scaling. So no pixel cracks, no blurriness, etc... Density is instead handled mostly at layout, as it should be.
This is also best practice on many other platforms, too (eg, 'pt' and 'em' units). This is far less commonly followed on most toolkits, though, but it's the norm on Android.
> 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.
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.
That really is a shame. Mac screens have been amazing for a long time now, but as soon as the computer inside them is outdated and slow, the whole device including the still awesome display is obsolete. Thats the main reason I'd probably never buy an iMac.
Speaking as someone who's in the market for a new display, I haven't been able to find a quality 27" 5K screen. LG has one, but it gets poor reviews. Everybody else is selling 4Ks, which is lower effective resolution than what I'm using now (a 23" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema display). So this is definitely appealing to me.
I am in the same bucket. LG Ultrafine is the only option which seems available. But it's an old model and I am surprised the lack of availability from the other manufacturers.
I have the LG ultra fine 5k and it's a very good monitor. It has a small defect: occasionally there is a small flickering on the central vertical line. It goes away if you put the screen to sleep and wake it again (it takes a few seconds, and I had to do it a handful of times in a year)
The effective resolution of 4K is 2x in both directions because to match the size you just set the 27" screen a bit farther away so it fills the same field of view. The jump in resolution from going 4K will be very noticeable and a 27" 4K IPS screen is less than 300€. Well worth the upgrade.
Because I’m on a Mac, everything will be rendered at 2x resolution, giving me the same usable area as a 1920x1080 display, even though the physical area is larger. That’s a step backwards—I’m not willing compromise on usable area or 2x resolution, so a 4K display isn’t good enough.
(Edit: my Cinema Display is something like 15 years old, so I’m confident I’ll get my money’s worth out of a new purchase.)
OSX does have intermediate steps so you can use those instead. It's not true fractional scaling but as the resolution increases the artifacts are less noticeable. Don't know if there are any 2400px tall 4K screens if you want to go for exactly the same dimensions.
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.
I might be ignorant here, but what trend? Scrolljacking was popular for about 5 minutes back around 2010 during the HTML5 craze before people realized how awful a UX it is. The only place I still see it being used regularly is Apple sites. Have you seen this pattern used elsewhere?
Hey, it's marginally more usable than unskippable Flash intros, which is what we used to get.
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.
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.
Hard to say. Those are actually designed for the other way around: Plugging a USB-C device into a displayport monitor, by extracting the alternative mode out of the USB-C connection.
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.
Unfortunately I bought an LG 4k display from Apple last year (or was it the year before?) for home office work so it'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 "one cable to rule them all" setup. Maybe I'll just have to save some of my allowance for a bit :P
awkwardly small / awkwardly positioned second display when compared to a regular second display. main display has its own cam. and the external magic trackpad can go front and center on my desk.
the wasted parts get to come out to play when undocked :)
Show me a higher/same resolution display with a higher refresh rate. I'd genuinely curious. I've been searching for a new monitor for a few weeks and can't find anything with 4K and more than 60Hz refresh rate.
As the other comment pointed out, that is not an apples to apples comparison. The monitor you linked is a UHD one (3840 x 2160 pixels, around 8.3 megapixels) with a pixel density of ~200 ppi. The display showcased by Apple has a resolution of 5K (5120 x 2880 pixels, around 14.75 megapixels) with a pixel density of 217 ppi. Also, based on my experiences with LG gaming monitors I would assume that the Apple display also has a significantly better color accuracy.
If you would have taken a second to look at the specs and search for actually comparable products you would find that there are, at least to my knowledge, no displays with the same resolution and higher refresh rates. This makes sense because 5k@60Hz already has incredibly high bandwidth requirements.
The best actually comparable product is an LG UltraFine 5K which comes in at 1,499€ msrp which is 246€ cheaper than Apple's Studio Display at 1,745€ msrp. Oh, and to no ones surprise, it also has a 60 Hz refresh rate.
So to answer your initial question: Yes, people do spend that kind of money on displays with "only" 60Hz.
Different priorities. People buying these are looking for good specs in color reproduction, contrast (as far as is possible without FALD backlighting), and perhaps most importantly consistent QC.
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).
Nobody is buying this monitor for contrast, it has about the worst contrast available at the price point. It's failure to actually serve this priority at all genuinely makes me wonder what the target audience is.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadStill very cool though.
Thank you! Another example that writing something wrong on the internet is the best way to find the truth :)
That said, it looks like there's just one input port and three output ports. Would need to do some hack there as well, to avoid constant cable changing.
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)
Edit: to clarify I will lurk and wait until it is £200 off on Amazon one day because I don’t need it immediately.
It would be nice if it cost less than 1000€, but I guess you can't have everything.
When I got my iPhone 13 pro it cost me an M1 iPad and a 14” MBP because everything felt horrible afterwards.
Because DSC has been broken ever since the Big Sur betas. Catalina supported 1.4 and DSC and my cheese grater Mac Pro happily drove 2x27" 4K monitors in HDR @ 144Hz.
Big Sur? Nope, you get 95Hz SDR or 60Hz HDR. If you set the monitors to DP1.2 you get 120Hz SDR.
The Studio Display is an additional $300.
I am guessing this replaces it.
Not really other alternatives out there (displays in 5k).
Super fragile, especially if you have the monitor on an arm and move it around a lot.
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.
Glossy isn’t ideal but I’d definitely take it over spending $500 on a 4K ultra sharp display only to view everything through a fine layer of grainy rainbow colored dust.
Apple’s nano-matte technology seems like it could be a wonderful albeit expensive compromise, but I know I and many others are willing to pay the premium.
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...
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.
Weird to think that Flash handled this kind of animation seamlessly on browsers 15 years ago.
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"
[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.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12568/iiyamas-prolite-xb2779q...
[2]: https://www.dell.com/ae/business/p/dell-up2715k-monitor/pd
Low refresh rate is bad for pros for the same reason it's bad for gamers, it makes it harder to quickly and accurately perceive things in motion and it slows down your ability to accurately execute inputs. I feel the effects of the reality distortion field has caused everybody to believe that quite simply no real professionals could dislike working on 60hz LCDs and the disappointment is all caused by all those silly gamers.
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.
How color accurate is the screen? How well does it handle HDR? Does it ever get blurry? If you've ever tried run Linux, either bare or VM, did it handle dpi correctly?
I haven't tested for color accuracy or HDR. No Linux. Does not get "blurry" while I'm gaming.
My only recent comparisons are my new 16" M1 MBP and my 1440p Dell U2719 monitor (provided by work). Colors are wildly better than the Dell (of course) and it seems close to the MBP, although the MBP looks better out of the box of course.
At time of purchase, the only viable 240Hz 1440p options were this Alienware or the Samsung Odyssey G7. The Alienware offered better latency, and it was 40% off on the Dell website for some reason, so that's the one I went with.
TFTCentral does pretty thorough reviews, they seem to like the Alienware. https://tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_alienware_aw2721d
Didn't Apple corner the market on these displays by buying up all available capacity for retinas?
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.
Check the t- or x- series which are many many orders of magnitude wider deployed.
Random cheapo laptop: 1366x.. One better: apple Even better: higher priced laptop had 1920x.... Oh, and those had IPS displays unlike apple with (halfway decent) TN panels.
So everybody else pushed, then apple not only caught up but jumped ahead. And now they are again behind with 3k vs 4k and 5k vs 8k and miniled vs oled with the same order: cheap < apple < expensive.
Same for the macbook air/ultrabook form factor: Invented by Sony but only got popular once apple jumped on the train years later.
Apple is really good at "sherlocking" and getting out a polished/well-integrated version of something that has been around for years and making it popular.
Of course macOS supports these higher resolutions but there’s also the color calibration and support for wider color gamuts other than sRGB and having that all integrated together.
For example, the iMac had Display P3 (a color space 50% bigger than RGB) support starting in 2015.
This been said, I can remember CRTs at 60hz with side scrollers and demos at 60fps with perfect image stability while scrolling. You could read tiny texts scrolling up and down perfectly. This is not the case anymore with LCD panels...
Try to read a webpage while scrolling, impossible.
60hz or 120hz I would pay for a stable image in motion. It would bring tremendous confort.
This isn't really contested anywhere.
We're fine with 24FPS for films and tv shows, but try that for an FPS and it's considered nigh unplayable. I remember when the line was "the human eye can't see past 30FPS" now it's at 60. The treadmill keeps going.
Faster refresh doesn't necessarily mean a better display. I suspect Apple's displays are higher quality than most competitors even if they max out at 120Hz.
Here are the specs for the latest MacBook Pros:
Has this monitor's price been announced?
the Pro stand is $999 or VESA Mount Adapter is $199.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr/standard-...
352 × 416 pixels at 2.1" is about 259 pixels per inch.
When introducing the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said the number of pixels needed for a Retina display is about 300 PPI for a device held 10 to 12 inches from the eye.
So, not far off at all, you're right.
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'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.
LG, Dell, and Iiyama all made such monitors; the only survivor is the LG one. They didn't sell well, apparently.
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.
Which is a shame, you can use 8K monitors with Windows at e.g. 300% just fine.
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.
macOS draws only at 1x or 2x. 3x is iOS only.
Apples decision to support only integer scaling was what allowed them to adopt Retina displays very quickly. Unfortunately it led to a subotimal solution in the long term.
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.
It is absolutely not reasonable. HTML tables with horizontal grid lines will appear to have varying line thicknesses when in reality they are all set to the same width.
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.
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.
If even Microsoft can’t be bothered, what do you expect from app developers?!
Apple has never settled for “fine” either it’s great or it gets cuts at some point.
>if you know what you’re doing as an application developer. Apple also tends to avoid wading into footgun waters to keep quality (for 3rd party devs) as high as possible across the board.
Many (most?) don't or can't be bothered so the end result in practice is that it doesn't work. Microsoft has been chasing the HiDPI fairy for decades and the situation hasn't really gotten better. They still ship software (both in and outside the OS) that isn't HiDPI aware.
Retina prioritizes making it easy for developers to adopt: Double the size of artwork, points are 2 pixels, Done. Are there quibbles? Sure. But millions of people are looking at HiDPI screens where every single thing in the OS and all third party apps they use fully support 2x.
No one lives in the magical world where arbitrary scaling factors are supported. Doing that as a developer is just too damn complicated when @1x + @2x (and maybe @3x) makes 98% of people happy and is vastly less work.
Well, I want to say it has gotten better. Their Metro design is what a UI has to look like to work with arbitrary scales and still solve those problems I mentioned. The downsides are it uses simple geometric shapes and has tons of whitespace everywhere so text can reflow in longer languages.
This is probably another big reason behind “flat design” in modern websites, the old skuomorphic (sp) stuff would be hard to do with vectors.
(As for vectors in UI, they have other performance issues which are important if you like live resizing windows.)
It's definitely possible to do, although retrofitting an existing UI toolkit & ecosystem is a massive challenge.
Actually it can't escape pixel cracks either, as I seem to remember OpenGL ES 1.0 including GL_LINES where the default width is 1px.
This is also best practice on many other platforms, too (eg, 'pt' and 'em' units). This is far less commonly followed on most toolkits, though, but it's the norm on Android.
Text size controls are in iOS as an accessibility feature (dynamic type) but it's not always on and it can't be the approach to HiDPI.
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.
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.
Now you can buy the exact same monitor, for 1600$.
We've made a lot of progress.
(Edit: my Cinema Display is something like 15 years old, so I’m confident I’ll get my money’s worth out of a new purchase.)
I now set all my monitors to turn on screensaver within 1 minute.
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.
I hope they do 4k@120hz in the next version!
The comments underneath https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30604524 however suggest it might work with some bidirectional adapters.
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.
You're wasting the very good parts that are trackpad, cam, mic and as a secondary monitor.
the wasted parts get to come out to play when undocked :)
If you would have taken a second to look at the specs and search for actually comparable products you would find that there are, at least to my knowledge, no displays with the same resolution and higher refresh rates. This makes sense because 5k@60Hz already has incredibly high bandwidth requirements.
The best actually comparable product is an LG UltraFine 5K which comes in at 1,499€ msrp which is 246€ cheaper than Apple's Studio Display at 1,745€ msrp. Oh, and to no ones surprise, it also has a 60 Hz refresh rate.
So to answer your initial question: Yes, people do spend that kind of money on displays with "only" 60Hz.
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).