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Agree with you. But in my case I use a MBP as a desktop 80% of the time so wanted a zero hassle monitor that will charge my MBP and take over some of the ancillary functions built into the laptop. It does that perfectly so I bought one and I love it already.

The price is high but it's not unreasonable for the overall quality and it comes with decent service and support unlike all other vendors in the UK which hire third party repairers who are hell to deal with.

Edit: really interested to see a teardown of this display appear. Not sure if anyone will do one though :(

> Agree with you. But in my case I use a MBP as a desktop 80% of the time so wanted a zero hassle monitor that will charge my MBP and take over some of the ancillary functions built into the laptop. It does that perfectly so I bought one and I love it already.

Sounds like the old Apple Thunderbolt Display... which is built a lot simpler than the new model. Basically it's nothing more [1] than a PSU and a TB controller exposing eDP to the panel and PCI Express to deal with network, firewire, USB and audio. Dead simple.

The new one just reeks of needless over-engineering, similar to the Lightning-to-HDMI adapter [2]. Why the fuck does a monitor need an embedded OS?!

> The price is high but it's not unreasonable for the overall quality and it comes with decent service and support unlike all other vendors in the UK which hire third party repairers who are hell to deal with.

Oh yeah, that's a scourge on the industry and not exclusive to the UK. I had the "pleasure" of dealing with a carrier-bought Samsung tablet which as it turns out had a broken screen which made its bootloader refuse to boot. At the last second I read the T&C of the repair shop the carrier had contracted with, which stated that device erasure was mandatory which also meant I'd lose all content on the encrypted SD card. Had them bail out on literally the last second and send them back the device, so I could do the repair myself - at my own expense, to add insult to injury.

[1]: https://de.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+Thunderbolt+Display+Tea...

[2]: https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/accessories/apple-lightning-av...

I had one and abandoned it the moment I got a Retina MBP because I couldn't bare to stare at 1440p screens any more. I paid £899 for it when it came out. That's £1165 now with inflation.

Applying that to the Studio Display now, I paid £330 more for the Studio Display, gain a charger, 5k screen, decent speaker system, decent webcam and a warranty. And it looks really nice sitting in front of me.

I'm really not bothered.

As for the OS, I don't care if it's got an imp with a paintbrush drawing the pixels on the inside of the glass as long as it works.

> I had one and abandoned it the moment I got a Retina MBP because I couldn't bare to stare at 1440p screens any more.

Apple laptops are like heroin for eyes: experience it once and you can't go back.

Just this weekend my s/o needed a new laptop - unfortunately, she's more or less locked into the Windows world, and needs some serious-ish GPU offering. Apple was unfortunately out of the question because the M1 can't run Windows... so we looked around, and there was literally no offer that had an aluminium case, a decent GPU/CPU/RAM combo and a screen with a better resolution than 1080p at a reasonable price!

We settled on an Acer Swift X in the end and made the compromise at the display.

> Why the fuck does a monitor need an embedded OS?!

They've explained this. It's so that features like Center Stage and spatial audio can work when connected to Macs that don't have Apple Silicon. Also to run the camera's ISP.

> Why the fuck does a monitor need an embedded OS?!

I doubt this is new. The Dell U2718Q I am using right now can "crash" so that video input still works but none of the buttons do until I yank the power cord and plug it back in.

I haven't heard of that monitor, but looked it up as looked interesting - people say it has burn in, that it randomly turns off when using M1 Mac Mini, that you can't get full resolution on some Macs (though maybe they used wrong cables) and that can only update the firmware via Windows.

I think this is where Apple 'just does stuff right' - you know if you buy the Studio Monitor that it will just work, having built in webcam is really nice, I presume it will charge a laptop etc.

Price is steep though.

All IPS displays have some "burn in" but it's not permanent. It's image persistence. It was also commented on a lot with the first IPS MacBooks. It's a bit annoying but not a serious issue like (or CRT) burn in. And we have a good existing way of preventing it, the screen saver. Even if it does happen it goes away in a couple hours.

I think the studio display is really poor value though as previously you would get a whole computer included for pretty much the same price. The little extras really have to be in your corner to be worth it.

> that you can't get full resolution on some Macs

This is one area that Apple definitely does not "just do stuff right". Display Stream Compression has been broken (for Intel Macs) - and by broken I don't mean 'suboptimal', but "completely nonfunctional" ever since the first beta of Big Sur, and is to this day - is a well-known, documented issue (many users, multiple GPUs, differing monitors), though Apple has yet to acknowledge it.

My 2019 Mac Pro cheesegrater could, under Catalina, drive 4K monitors in 10 bit HDR at 144Hz.

As soon as Big Sur was installed, your options became HDR@60Hz or SDR@95Hz. Turn off DSC in the monitor and you get the DP1.2 bandwidth.

> I can get a lot more display for $1500 (MSI Prestige 5k2k)

I have that monitor… but it’s 3/4 of the studio display in terms of pixel count.

   *for my gig as a software developer who does a bit of video

The extra width is key, and the density and brightness are acceptable. The qualities are a vector more than a scalar, and someone less presbyopic and more AV focused might give those different weights.

I recommend doing it as a side-by-side though, I did this with the monitor in question and the iPad Pro before choosing the former.

I don’t think this was the monitor that Apple was hoping to release. Rather it was a monitor that they felt forced to release, since the state of Mac monitors is not great: https://betterdesigned.substack.com/p/the-market-needed-the-...

The XDR and the upcoming mid range monitor seem to be what Apple wants to do, but there was a dearth of good, professional monitors for the Mac. The Studio Display is a nice work monitor for lots of people.

More on that here: https://betterdesigned.substack.com/p/the-market-needed-the-...

That's an interesting idea.

> Like much in the technology space, monitors have become a race to the bottom price-wise.

I suspect that this is because computers monitors are using the same aspect ratios as televisions. I was at Costco the other day looking at televisions, and the smallest TV they had was 55". So basically, computer monitors are using panels coming from fully depreciated manufacturing lines. The "innovation" in panel manufacturing is happening at 75" (if you look at what is on offer at Costco). That's completely useless for computer monitors.

What Apple should do is diverge from the television market. Focus on a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio - or something else. Give up the profit margin in the short term to build up an innovation pipeline that delivers high margins later on. Microsoft is building some laptops in 3:2, so Apple wouldn't even be the only one that is willing to buy them. The two of them together would pull the rest of the players along.

Every Apple product is a Tim Cook product.

The only reason the iPod was so successful was because he had the foresight to buy up all air freight for the holiday season.

Apple would not introduce functionnality like Face ID in an update. That is not how they operate. As a matter of fact, I'm not so sure they have every single sensor required for Face ID in that display.

They just introduced Universal Control in an update, so it seems entirely how they might operate.

Universal Control is a software feature. Face ID is irrevocably married to very specific hardware sensors, so it's a bridge too far in my opinion. And honestly, just like Macs don't have touch screens, it's possible Apple has deemed Face ID not useful on Macs.

As far as we know it has the 12mp webcam, but not the other sensors and dot projector required for FaceID.