All in all… meh.

28% fewer pixels for 34% 42% fewer dollars (47% if you’re talking nano-textured) – so technically better value, if you don’t really care about screen real-estate. But that extra real estate is really valuable, and Apple have now apparently ceded the large display market to… well, mostly the tumbleweeds. Sure, there’s technically other 6k displays, like the LG, the Dell, or the Asus, but while they have some advantages – less than half the price, most notably – they have real big disadvantages – like low brightness and poor contrast ratios.

4⨉ the backlight zones is a significant improvement, I’ll grant Apple that. But it doesn’t eliminate the blooming that was problematic with the Pro Display XDR, merely reduces it. In an era of OLED displays – hell, my old LG TV from nearly a decade ago has an OLED display; this ain’t new technology – a brand new, ostensibly-high-end “studio” display still running on LED backlighting is just sad.

The extra brightness of the Studio Display XDR is merely nice – an extra 25% isn’t a big difference (certainly nothing like the +200% or so in going from a competing 6k display to the Apple Pro Display XDR). Props to Apple for the improvement, but it’s minor.

It’s interesting that the new, smaller, lower-resolution Studio Display XDR is nearly the same spatial volume as its big sister (and not as much lighter as its reduced resolution and screen dimensions would suggest). I wonder if that’s dictated by thermals?

I didn’t bother including the audio & camera aspects because I’m genuinely confused as to who, in the market for an expensive display, would care? If you’re doing photography there’s no sound anyway, and if you’re doing videography in this price range you should be using real speakers or headphones.

And the camera… sigh… I miss the iSight, which gave you a much better camera – thanks to physics – that you could optionally buy and use. And look at it – it was a beautiful design that functioned really well, that would have fit in perfectly with the Pro Display XDR!

I’m also choosing to overlook the firmware, which I assume uses the same weird, bastardised, glitchy version of iOS as the prior Studio Display model.

After more than six years, I was hoping for an improved Pro Display XDR, not merely a small version.

1. Only when used with Macs which support DSC (Display Stream Compression), otherwise the USB-C ports are limited to USB 2.0 (400 Mb/s). ↩︎