Comment by deminature

12 hours ago

Apple has updated Studio Display and XDR coming out soon, they just filed for regulatory approval in China, which historically has meant 1-3 months until release [1]. The updated models are expected to have a 2000+ zone Mini LED backlight and 120hz refresh rate, while the LG is old technology - 60hz and edge lit, plus the matte coating is anecdotally quite blurry and loses a lot of the detail of the 6K panel. May be worth waiting to see what Apple has in store for this product category before putting down thousands of dollars.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/15/new-studio-display-or-p...

7 comments

deminature

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ginko  12 hours ago

The apple display will have a complete fantasy price. Why even bother waiting for that?

  • cududa  9 hours ago

    Fantasy price for your personal usage or the personal usage of most average consumers/ software engineers, sure. It bears repeating: you're not the target audience.

    They've been in the display game a long time. For people that need the product capabilities for their specific job, like color grading, they seem to price them quite well, given everywhere I used to see $30,000-$50,000 reference monitors, I see Studio Displays now.

  • deminature  11 hours ago

    Other manufacturers are likely to use the same panel as the new XDR and Studio display. The peak display tech this year will be the same glossy, high refresh rate mini LED used in the Apple displays, sold by third parties for a more reasonable price. You have to compromise a bit on the design, but in return you get a sensible price, much greater input connectivity and 'dual mode' which is useful if you want to also use it for gaming.

    Here's the third party version of the upcoming 5K studio display refresh - 271KRAW16, 5K 27" 165hz glossy with mini led backlight https://www.tweaktown.com/news/109565/msi-unveils-worlds-fir...

  • refulgentis  12 hours ago

    Basically what he just said, last week I put in a ton of time researching and came to the same exact conclusion.

    But of course, you read that. So, I’ll take a hack at guessing what’s on your mind past that.

    I bet it won’t be much more expensive than the LG list price, $2000. LG seems hellbent on making margins on this panel in their 1st party monitor. Ex. You can get the same panel but better quality in Asus Proart for $1300.

    The key thing to watch here is, is Apple’s also 6K? If so, are they getting better panels than LG gives itself or Asus? (likely)

    Regardless, it’s a shitshow with this panel, I’d rather get a used UltraFine 5K than get one of LGs. I’d try Asus if it was easy for me to return. Only new option that’s better than a 10 year old UltraFine 5K with my fellow HiDPI nerds is…the $6K XDR display :/

    (n.b. I’m not being precious either, this an extremely painful conclusion I have every incentive to avoid, tl;dr I abandoned an UltraFine 5K to the trash heap because I didn’t have time to figure out how to move it 3,000 miles and assumed _surely_ there was a good option between 24-32” in hidpi…)

FireBeyond  9 hours ago

As an owner of the XDR, I find it ironic that you're saying "maybe wait to see before putting down thousands of dollars" for this $2K offering when there's no way that a refreshed XDR is going to be less than $6K.

Also as an owner of 2 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors that Apple rendered pointless to make the XDR work in the first place ("Wow, Apple's done some magic to make the display bandwidth work!" = "Apple fucked DP 1.4 users post-Catalina and will not admit it". Myself and countless other users saw our Macs that could drive those setups with Catalina be limited to 60Hz HDR, 95Hz SDR with Big Sur on. Hell, we got better performance if we told our displays to downgrade to DP 1.2).

And let's do the math:

- 6016 x 3384

- at 120Hz

- in 10 bit HDR

- 4:4:4 Chroma

works out to be just shy of 80Gbit/s.

Oh... plus if it's like the XDR with three additional ports that we'd assume should be at least 10Gbit/s each, and we're at 120Gbit/s.

Not that the XDR supports HDMI but you'd need at least HDMI 2.2, which isn't on any Mac right now.

And you'd need a full speed TB5 setup, so M4 Pro or Max (which I'll grant if you're laying out $6-7,000 for your display should be the least of your concern).

But saying that the XDR and this are comparable offerings is strange. "Hmm, why would I buy this $2,000 display now, when at some point in the near future Apple might have a better one for only triple the price!"