I might not be a big fan of Apple, but
I am a big fan of displays. So, of course, when they unveiled the new
Studio Display, we had to get one. But,
hold on, because
we also had to get the new Studio Display XDR, which notably doesn't have
Pro in the name anymore for some reason, but who cares because it's allegedly
very, very nice. And I want to see it for myself before I, you know, complain
about how much it costs. So, let's unbox these guys. We'll start with the Studio
Display. This one, to be perfectly frank, is actually really similar to the
old one. It's 5K, 27 in,
60 Hz, oh baby, and comes with the stand
attached. A nice little paper cover. I like how light it is. It's really easy
to carry. Inside here, we've just got what looks
to be a USB-C cable. This is a 1 m Thunderbolt 5 Pro cable. The Pro comes
from the sleeving and whatnot. This is expensive. For the 1 m version, it is a
very nice $69 US. Uh so, you're getting
that in the box. Considering the monitor is expensive, good. We'll get to price
later. Let's take a look at what else we've got cuz there's some kind of box
strapped to the back of this. This just holds the cable.
You know, that's kind of fun. A little pointless and wasteful, uh but I
actually really enjoyed just unraveling the cable out of the box as I pulled it
away. I don't know why, but I did. And then this just pulls out because it's,
you know, it's got these indents here so you can actually put it back in nicely
without ruining the packaging again. I love and hate this at the same time.
I'll take the fancy peel off with the
paper, and it just comes off so nicely
and you can actually keep this nice and pretty if you ever want to sell your
display later or put it away nicely or something, you know. I'm just going to
set this over here. Ooh.
Also stays in very nice shape and becomes very easy to reapply. This is
something I would love TV and monitor
manufacturers to do because, you know, you already save Well, I don't know
about you guys, I tend to save my boxes in case I have to move. I hate that I
can't reapply the peel. And the foam wrap that comes with a lot of displays,
it's nice, but this makes me feel a bit more comfortable. All you get is tilt.
That's it. Anything else, you got to move the whole monitor around. You can
get the upgraded stand, but it's going to cost you like $400. And if you do it
after the fact, I don't know how easy it is to see on camera, but this is like very integrated. I don't trust myself to
take this apart and put the new one on here. So, you're going to have to send it to Apple. It's going to cost you more
money. Make the decision before you order it from the store. I mean, the
reality is, you know, it's pretty light and it's easy to rotate around. So, like this isn't the end of the world. My main
issue is height adjustment. There is zero height adjustment on this thing out
of the box, and like that's a big deal. Oh, you can't pivot
it either. But like, those things are nice to have, but if you don't have
height adjustment, that's kind of make or break, at least in my opinion. She's
kind of thick, but you know, it's also not OLED, so this is actually pretty
reasonable. And this is the regular coating one. The XDR that we're going to
look at later, we did get the nano texture glass. So, we'll take a look at those side by side so you can decide for
yourself what coating you want. Let's take a look at everything else. The only
other major upgrade we've got is the uh
new camera. It's still the same 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, but
now we've got the desk view. How much you'll actually use the desk view, I
don't really know. It seems more of something that they kind of just tacked on during production. We've got
ventilation at the top here. I don't know if these are speaker grills or not.
There's no more cheese grater mesh at the back that a lot of people are, you
know, love or hate on. So, that's gone. Nice Apple logo on the back here.
Everything's just clean. I'll give Apple that. Their design is very, very clean
and like user neutral. I don't even want to say user friendly, at least in terms
of just aesthetics. It's like user neutral. On the back, we've got not one,
not two, but four USB-C ports. These are
both Thunderbolt 5. One's for your display in, and the other's meant for
daisy chaining if you want to hook up multiple monitors off of like one cable
solution. You could also use it for a dock considering, you know, these don't have KVMs built in. Especially cuz
there's no USB-A ports
anywhere. Another main difference between the regular Studio Display and
the XDR is that the power delivery on this guy's only 96 W. So, while that is
going to charge most of your devices, you might struggle a bit if you're
trying to both charge the battery at the same time as you're trying to do some
kind of like really intense workload. You know, it'll work and it'll trickle charge, but
you're not going to get the full fat. But, enough about the less expensive,
but still expensive option. Let's take a look at the one we've all
been waiting for, the Studio Display XDR.
Oh, wow. Okay, this is a way better experience if you follow the instructions. Okay, pull that back,
and then push this forward with the arrows.
Wow, and then this opens right up. Inside, we've got nice monitor.
Oh, baby. We've got the same
Thunderbolt 5 Pro cable, and the same Oh, no, there's something
else here. You get the fancy Apple polishing cloth
when you get the nano texture glass on a device.
I think you should get it anyway. It costs $20, which is also kind of wild.
And they even have a compatibility list to show you just what it's compatible
with. It's a microfiber cloth. It's compatible with everything. There's
nothing else in the box despite being, you know, there's multiple other boxes.
Like there's nothing in here. On the one hand, yeah, sure. It feels very
protective, especially for a display that costs as much as this one does. But
on the other hand, like really, you guys? Like this just seems
kind of wasteful to me, and um I get that it's recyclable, which is which is
good. There's no foam in here, but it just still seems like a lot of waste.
Oh, well. Let's look at the monitor. We've got more box around the back here, even more
packaging. Unlike most of our other packaging, I mean, I guess that has a purpose, too. But this has a purpose,
you know, it's to make sure that this doesn't just kind of
spring up on its own during shipment.
This one also had a peel. You know, we had a few complications
when we're taking it off, but that's okay. It will come protected when it shows up at your doorstep. Brad likes
the matte coating. I don't. I'm a very much a glossy kind of boy, and um I
instantly dislike this compared to the other one, at least with no content on.
Content displaying, this is going to look way better. We're talking mini LED
with like over 2,000 local dimming zones. It hits like 2,000 nits peak, and
it can do about 1,000 nits sustained full screen. So, it costs a pretty
penny, but I'm actually pretty excited for this. The stand is much better in
the sense that it has height adjustment, which is good. I'm kind of sad that
that's like a selling feature, but here we are. One of the main advantages
though of this stand is that it doesn't cost $1,000. So, this time,
if you're buying your Studio Display XDR, you don't have to just look at the
price and then do mental math of a thousand plus dollars if you want it to
come with the stand. So, thanks, Apple. That's cool. And then it's got that same
cable box on the back that I enjoy unraveling. Wow, look at me go, papa. It
looks basically identical to the other one. I mean, you can't You still can't
rotate it. You still can't pivot, but at least we have height adjustment now. And
uh can we angle? We can still angle, so that's pretty cool. Still got the same
cable coming out the back that doesn't want to disconnect on its own.
Otherwise, yeah, it's the same IO on the back here. Just four USB Type-C, but
these two here are Thunderbolt 5 again. This time with the max rating of 140 W
power delivery. And yeah, otherwise, it really is just almost the exact same.
Let me get this side by side cuz I want to look at the nano
coating. The XDR is ever so slightly
thicker. We are talking about like millimeters here, people. The only other
major difference is the grills here. Like this has about twice the speaker
grills as this one does, or cooling. Still not sure, but either way, oh, it
probably is cooling cuz this is going to go to like 2,000 nits versus this is
only doing about 600. But I still haven't seen the coating.
Yeah, like I'm sure with content, it'll be a little different. The glossy still
does have an anti-reflective coating on it. It's not doing a whole lot of
anti-reflecting, whereas the nano texture glass, I got to say, zero
basically zero reflection here. You get the cloth, I guess,
but it's an extra $300 for the nano
texture and a $20 cloth. So, you make your own decision. I definitely
think that there is a use case for either. I'm not going to know which one
I like more though until I turn them on and actually watch content on each of
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If you don't have any source material, they don't show anything except for this, which tells you, "Hey, plug
something in." As someone who wants to troubleshoot things, I don't like that.
There's also like zero uh navigation for an OSD or anything because it's all done
through software. As a person who loves PCs and normal displays that have all
that stuff on board, um it's a little disappointing to see that. What happens
if both your devices break? You don't know for sure if it's the
monitor or not. You want to just test one thing at a time. You can't do that. So, you got to take it to the Apple
Store and spend more money. Alas. Let's uh daisy chain these bad boys so that we
can look at the same content on both of them at the same time. We've got our
MacBook plugged in. I will say, this is just the lock screen, you know, so we
get some cool motion effects. But I do prefer the regular glossy display over
the nano texture glass. Uh you know, with both displays set to
whatever brightness they're at and they're pretty matched up right now. Yeah, I kind of like the one on the left
more. I I don't know. But let's put uh let's put some more content on them.
Let's watch some HDR footage. These are both set to HDR and running HDR content,
but there's a little bit of a problem here. The
XDR is using Apple's 2026 CMF.
So it's going to be running at a slightly different white point than the
1931 CIE that's going to be on this guy
and frankly most displays. Aside from that, this one looks way better. I mean,
it should. It's a significantly more expensive display. But when you get
dimming zones involved, um like this is HDR, but like it's really not cuz it's
just, you know, full screen brightness, whatever. Uh whereas this actually has
like highlights and dark zones and um IT
JUST HOWEVER, ALL OF THE ACTUAL REFERENCE
modes on the XDR are still using CIE 1931, which is the most common one that
you're going to find on pretty much every other display except
for I think the Sony Bravia that we tested like a couple months back.
They're trying to do their own thing, too. But I've really got to say that uh
it's kind of no contest, right? The XDR just looks so much better. I mean, the
blues look more vibrant on this building. You get actual dimming zones.
Oh, I want to see if I can spot them now in like content. No, it's a lot harder
on an actual video. Like I mentioned before, these are both 5K displays. So
we're getting a solid 218 PPI, which is
actually really good. They've also both got speakers, which is always a plus.
And they're using the A19 chips with the A19 Pro going in the XDR just for the,
you know, some better image processing. The other major downside if you're
trying to decide between these two displays and you think, well, you know,
I could save a couple grand. Unfortunately, what you're also not getting when you
save that money is higher refresh rate cuz this guy caps out at 60 hertz and it
also caps out around 600 nits of brightness, which is a little
disappointing. Whereas with the XDR,
you're getting 120 hertz and you're getting that sweet sweet 2000 nit peak
brightness I mentioned earlier. And when you spend a bit extra on the X Well,
when you spend a lot extra on the XDR, you're also getting Adobe RGB and DICOM
for anyone who's, you know, in the medical field. It might not matter to
you, but for professionals buying these displays, that's probably going to be a
big make or break part of the decision. Now, as for color accuracy, I'm happy to
say that they're both relatively color accurate. In internet and web sRGB
reference mode, our studio display
regular measured a delta E average of under one, which is very impressive. And
then the max was under two. It was like 1.81. And then as for the XDR, we got
almost the same results. A little bit higher on the average, a little bit less
on the max. Still well under the delta E 2000 of two that you want to get. As for
HDR, the studio display it supports HDR, but it doesn't really
do it. Um you don't have dimming zones.
It's going to be a bad experience. We did not measure it. But the XDR display,
we measured HDR video reference mode and we got a delta E ITP measurement average
of 2.35 with a max of under five. That's
impressive. The only thing that we've ever measured that's better than that is
the iPad with the tandem OLED display. It's certainly not perfect, you know,
it's only going to do 2000 nits, which I mean, sure, that's still pretty good for
a monitor these days. Uh but there are other displays coming
out that are getting even brighter. It actually does have quite good contrast.
It's not an OLED killer, but you know, it's pretty solid. I would like more
dimming zones. 2000 is still a lot for a display this size, but like
it's just tough to beat OLED when they've got per pixel dimming. But I digress. What I really want to know is,
can I game on the 120 hertz
Apple Studio Display XDR? Of course I can. Let's do it. One problem with using
this with a Windows device instead of Apple is
I can't really adjust anything anymore. So if you have a MacBook, you can plug
that in, change things, and then hook it up to your computer and it will keep all
of those settings, which is on one hand kind of cool. On the other hand, it's
infuriating that there's not just physical buttons I can sit here and
fiddle with to fix whatever brightness settings I want to change. Another minor
thing is like HDR is just acting kind of funky with Windows. Steam, I don't know
if you can really pick this up on camera, but the Steam overlay like
flickers a little bit when I change Windows. So let's just load up Cyberpunk
and see how it looks. All right, here we go. Cyberpunk, it's at 4K. We're using
uh pretty janky adapter, but that's all right. We still got 4K 120. Everything's
working and it is beautiful.
Like straight up. It's it's a really good HDR experience. The screen is very
bright. It's very vibrant. It looks absolutely stunning. I think we measured
something like a 12 millisecond gray to gray, which is not great. But like this
is gameable, especially if I wasn't playing a first-person shooter and I was
playing something more third-person or just a little less, you know, fast-paced
than Cyberpunk. At 120 hertz, we measured um just a couple milliseconds
over the theoretical perfect. So it's still getting, you know, there's not a
whole lot of extra latency, which is always great. I definitely wish the motion was better. As someone who is
spoiled, I notice it. But the highlights
on the gun, the highlights on the car, the sky, the colors, like the HDR
experience is genuinely fantastic on a display like
this. Let's talk about the price now because you're paying a lot for it. For
the regular studio display, you're paying about $1600.
Admittedly, it's 5K on a 27-in panel, so that's, you know, 218 PPI. But
considering it's 2026 and you're paying over a thousand dollars, I really would
have liked to see 120 hertz. It just
it feels bad. I don't care if there's a camera built in. I don't care if there's
speakers built in. 60 hertz spending over that like that
kind of No, that's just unacceptable. The XDR has 120 hertz. The XDR costs
about twice as much at $3300.
Our model with the nano texture glass cost a little more than that. Uh I'm
just glad they don't cost $5000 plus an extra grand for the stand. It's nice to
see not only the display tech get better by quite a bit, to be frank, while also
seeing a price cut. But 3300 bucks still
feels like a lot in this day and age. I don't know you guys. The reality is
Apple's still going to sell a ton of both the XDR and the non-XDR model and I
can't say I blame them cuz they're pretty nice. They're just, you know, they're overpriced. But if you're
already an Apple user, you know, you want to stay in the ecosystem, I guess.
Can I recommend it? No, I can't. Like the price is just astronomical. Can I
tell you it's a good display? Absolutely. Both of them. They both look
really good. They both tested well. I just, you know, I can't put my rubber
stamp on that and not when the price is so high. Thanks for watching, guys. This is the
Studio Display and Studio Display XDR. If you want to see another video, um
look at the one of the tandem OLEDs I
checked out recently. Those are pretty nice, too. And hey, they're coming down in price.
You can get an OLED gaming monitor for a lot less than a thousand dollars these
days.