The Apple Studio Display brings out lots of emotions
for people.
It's either the screen we've all been waiting for
or the biggest disappointment in technology
in the past decade.
The Studio Display, the Apple Studio Display.
Biggest disappointment of the last 10 years.
Yeah.
But like many devices we've seen come from Apple
over the past many years,
the story is a little deeper and more annoying
because those buggers in the glass circle
are masters of getting you to pay more
than you otherwise would want to.
And damn it, you're gonna like it
because it's the best monitor there is.
Right.
So the expectation is that this monitor is perfect,
but it's not.
And that's the tension.
So I'm gonna show you my nitpicks about the Studio Display
and a very suitable alternative not from Apple.
It's like the cable's already attached.
Oh, right.
And then there's that.
Allow me to at least briefly explain why everyone is so mad.
Apple has a pretty long
and storied history of making very nice,
quite expensive monitors for their desktops.
There's the portrait Macintosh display from the late 80s,
and then the larger than you ever thought possible
Apple Cinema displays through the aughts,
all the way to the Pro Display XDR.
32 inches, 6K resolution, mini LED contrast ratio,
HDR brightness.
It's five plus thousand dollar price tag was defensible,
but still quite dear.
Everyone else who wanted an Apple display,
had to either get the 5K display built into the iMac
or settle at the Apple store checkout
for a $1,300 LG 5K ultra-fine display.
And the display shaped hole in the Apple lineup
felt like a major oversight.
I already lamented about this last fall
when I pitched some admittedly strange alternatives,
which I will still defend,
but don't worry because Apple
have finally given us their answer.
The $1,600 Apple Studio Display.
On paper, it's what Apple has to offer.
It's what I've been asking for.
A new Thunderbolt display with the lauded 5K resolution
in a well-built, attractive enclosure.
It's certainly much more attractive
than the old LG 5K ultra-fine display,
which LG still sells though,
no longer through the Apple store.
Despite the new Studio Display being an all new product
from Apple, it essentially uses the same LG panel
that is found in the ultra-fine and the iMac.
Though in here, it's about 100 nits brighter.
That paired with the ultra-fine display,
and paired with the anti-reflective coating
that Apple puts on their glossy screens,
means that you can place it opposite a window
and never notice.
It also means that nanotexture is really not worth it
unless you absolutely know you need it.
The 200 plus pixels per inch look nice, crisp,
and is perfect for macOS, but accuracy,
I still have to figure that out in another video,
so subscribe if you wanna find out
how to calibrate an Apple monitor.
Even if it turns out to be
Perfectly accurate, that should be a given at this price
and not really enough to justify
the $300 price increase alone.
So what else is there?
The new studio display has all the latest technologies
fitted within a very thin package.
There are the best speakers you'll ever hear
built into a monitor.
They're good enough that I don't think you'll need
to buy another pair.
Next, the webcam gets center stage,
which is probably the best place for it.
This is the webcam and microphone
of the Apple Studio display.
There is lots of commotion going on behind me,
as you can see, and the center stage camera is pretty nifty.
When I tested it in a Zoom call,
I found that it works as good or better
than any of the other webcams I tried,
and that's with harsh window light.
Others have not found the webcams as compelling
and their screenshots do show some stark differences.
There's room for improvement for sure,
but after some Zoom compression,
it's not really that bad.
Same goes for the microphone.
All of these fancy new features are enabled
by an A13 powered logic board running iOS.
And if that goes wrong,
you can only reboot the monitor by pulling the power cord
as there's no off button.
And that's my thing about this monitor.
Apple might think they put lots of thought into the features,
but when you start zooming in on the design details,
you'll find that they've received little attention.
It's not actually all that innovative where it matters.
The fact they were able to fit the power supply they did
behind this panel is mighty impressive.
It's nice too, as you don't have to deal
with the giant power brick dangling somewhere.
But that convenience is compromised by the fact
that Apple attached a knot for you to remove cable
to power the display.
This was a problem they already fixed
with the LED cinema display,
but somehow we've regressed back to this hassle.
Here's a free idea.
What about powering the monitor through Thunderbolt
from the Mac Studio?
The USB-C standard supports enough
to power a display like this.
So could you imagine a single port solution
like the old ADC connector?
And then for laptop users,
Apple could flip the script,
offering an external power supply with Ethernet
like the iMac,
and then make the studio display the perfect hub.
Speaking of hubs,
while the USB hub on the back of the display
now supports up to 10 gig speeds,
the Thunderbolt input is in completely the wrong spot.
Is it over here?
With the downstream ports,
it should be tucked in behind the stand with the power cord.
Everything going into the monitor should go through here.
Look how much better this immediately looks.
The included Thunderbolt cable is also annoyingly short.
That means you can't really put the Mac Studio
or a MacBook on the left side of your screen.
And if you have two screens,
you're gonna have to put the computer
in the center between them.
And if you want three screens,
you're gonna need to buy a longer cable,
which Apple will sell to you for $130.
Then there's the whole stand situation.
Apple's hardware designers moved the mounting point
for their modern monitor stands
from here in the center down to here on the new iMac,
and now this.
The benefit is a smaller footprint on your desk.
That's great if you're using a yellow iMac at home,
but it's not great if you need more flexibility.
But it's not great if you need more flexibility.
The standard stand is a little low
for a tall person like me.
So Apple offers a height adjustable stand option,
which uses the same nifty hinge design
as found in the $1,000 Pro display stand.
And on here, it's $400,
which is a little dear when you note
that the stand doesn't support rotation.
Even more annoying is that thanks to all that A13 power
on board, the monitor does in fact support auto rotation,
which is awesome.
But for that, you have to opt for the VESA mount.
Generally, I wish that VESA mounts and arms
would look better from behind.
Here though, Apple isn't really helping things.
Again, because of the mount placement,
Apple had to create this stretched H pattern
to move the mount point to the center.
But that means now the Apple logo gets blocked.
A charitable way of putting it is that
it's peeking above the plate.
How cute.
Oh, right.
And I almost forgot the worst part.
You have to choose what style of monitor you want,
what stand you want at the time of purchase.
Because unlike previous Apple displays,
this one has a non-user removable stand.
Rumors exist that you can take the monitor
to the Apple store and have them swap the stand,
but I called and at the time of writing, you can't.
Look, all I'm doing is holding the studio display
up to the precedence set by its predecessors.
Those had great cable management.
Those had a user-friendly way to swap the stand
for a VESA mount.
So considering that the price
has gone up well then so would the expectation and scrutiny.
If this 5K monitor came out in black
with the cylindrical Mac Pro in 2013 for $1,600,
our collective heads would have exploded with glee.
But unfortunately, the technology to transmit
this amount of pixels didn't exist yet.
If in 2016, this monitor had come out in space gray
alongside the Touch Bar MacBook Pro
instead of the LG Ultra Fine at $1,600,
we would have all loved and praised it.
But it's 2022 and we've already had five years
of a $1,300 LG Ultra Fine display
and six plus years of the $1,800 5K iMac.
This is old display technology
and some fancier speakers and center stage camera
isn't going to make up for that
or the poorly placed mounting point and Thunderbolt input.
So what have other monitor makers been doing in the meantime?
Well, I'll show you one of my favorites,
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My favorite monitor available at the moment is this,
the Huawei MateView.
This is a screen that is unlike any other screen you can buy.
It has a three by two aspect ratio.
It has truly next level industrial design
that's just as height adjustable
as the expensive stand option from Apple,
while being just as attractive.
Many people here actually mistook it.
For the Apple Studio Display.
It's more color accurate
and almost as bright as the Studio Display
while costing less than half the price.
As far as value is concerned,
this is a truly great monitor.
But there are flaws here too.
Unlike Apple, Huawei put no effort in the garnish.
The speaker sounds like it came from a 2005 laptop.
The built-in microphone is awful too,
though there's no webcam anyway.
The matte display,
they finish shows way more glare
than Apple's glossy screens.
But perhaps the biggest flaw
is the placement of the USB-C input.
It's right here on the side of the stand.
Why?
That means it's always visible
contributing to the cable clutter.
And if you wanna be able to use these built-in USB-A ports,
which is handy,
you have to use this plug.
Oh, and the last issue is that for geopolitical reasons,
it's not available in the US.
My fellow Canadians, it's about $900 here, which is sweet.
Apple's external displays have always been quite expensive,
but we accepted that for cohesive industrial design,
great build quality, and advanced technology.
But as the display technology got older,
the prices at least became more manageable.
The glorious 30-inch cinema display launched at $3,500,
but was only $1,700 when it was discontinued.
This continued six years later.
The last Thunderbolt display, which was great, by the way,
was priced at $1,000.
I think the Apple Studio display costs too much.
It should be 1,300 tops,
especially when you consider that before,
you could get an iMac with this panel for $1,800,
with a whole computer for only $200 more
than this monitor costs.
Apple's hardware engineering has been on a righteous roll
these past few years, amazing us,
with fast, efficient chips we never thought possible.
This has been great for their computers,
but what's happened with the Studio display
is that that philosophy has been applied here too,
at the detriment to everything else.
This is an electrically engineered product
as opposed to a holistically designed product,
and that really is too bad.
Thanks for displaying this Mac Address.
If you like my alternative pick for the Studio display,
give this video a like,
and if you just wanna get a Studio display,
display yourself, well, you might as well subscribe.
Now, I'm curious, in the comments,
how important are displays to you?
I think they are a monument of computing on your desk,
so they should look and be nice.
Do you agree?