Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here

If you buy something from a link, it may earn you a commission. Our ethics statement can be found here.

Oh boy.

People have wanted Apple to sell the 5K display from the iMac as a stand-alone product for a long time. When the first iMac came out, the display was so far ahead of the competition that buying one for the screen alone represented a bargain, and there was an entire computer attached to it.

Apple discontinued the iMac and replaced it with the new Mac Studio and the new 27 inch display. If the Mac Studio is the fulfillment of a 20-year-old Mac power user's dream, then the Studio display should be the fulfillment of a similar dream that has been around since the iMac was released.

A lot of things have happened. The headline webcam feature of the studio display works so badly that it is almost useless. This dream is quite frightening.

The Pro Display XDR, Apple's first entry in the mainstream display market in a long time, was priced at $4,999 and was geared towards professionals. When you consider that the only other 5K display on the market is the old and expensive LG Ultrafine 5K, you can see why the studio display is more defensible.

Apple made a lot of promises about the audio and video capabilities of the Studio Display, for example, it has six speakers, three microphones, and a 12-megapixel camera that is all run by an A13 chip.

The pitch is that you get a 5K display which can display macOS at perfect resolution with no scaling issues, and that it will match Apple's world-beating iOS devices. This is quite a pitch considering the recent history of miserable Mac webcams.

The standard $1,599 model and the $1,899 model with Apple's nanotexture glass are the review units we have. Adding a stand with height adjustment costs $400 for some reason. You can pair the VESA mount with the stock stand at no extra cost. You have to decide how you want this display mounted before you click the buy button. It has been a long time since Apple made displays; the company's approach to display stands and stand pricing reflects that absence from the market, in the sense that it is from a different planet entirely.

The studio display is great at the basics, and Apple is generally terrific when it comes to displays across its devices. If you've ever looked at a iMac display, you know what it looks like. The studio display has the same 27 inch size, 5120x2880 resolution, 218 inch screen, and 60Hz refresh rate. The only real difference is that the iMac has 500 nits of brightness, while the studio display has 600 nits.

The real issue is that $1,599 is a lot of money, and here it is buying you panel tech that is woefully behind the curve. The Studio Display is the most notable for the things it doesn't have, compared to Apple's other displays.

Let's start with the light. The best modern displays will create true blacks by cutting the light coming from the black parts of the screen. There are several ways to do this, and Apple uses different tech across its high-end products to produce true blacks in various ways.

The studio display doesn't have that. It's a regular old LED backlight that lights the entire screen all the time, and the dark black it can produce is basically gray. It looks fine in a well-lit room, but if you are watching a movie in a dark room, the letterboxing will look light gray. There are TVs with more advanced local-dimming.

The studio display is an SDR display and has no HDR modes to speak of. Apple's high-end phones, laptops, and tablets all support HDR, but the studio display tops out at 600 nits, and Apple doesn't offer a mode for it in the software. The studio display doesn't have true HDR because it doesn't have local dimming.

The Studio Display only offers a 60Hz refresh rate, which is woefully behind Apple's other top-tier products like the iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and the iPhone 13 Pro, all of which offer the ProMotion variable refresh rate system. The iPhone 13 Pro can be dropped to as low as 10Hz to save battery life, but it costs over $1,000. There are a lot of less expensive displays with variable refresh rate that are supported by macOS.

The only reason to chase after this display is if you want to have a 5K display that can display MacOS at perfect resolution with no scaling. I don't want to discount this: a lot of people care about that a lot, and for those people, the only other 5K option on the market is a buggy one.

For those of you who don't care about the quality of macOS with no scaling, the cost of $1,599 will sound ridiculous, and there are lots of other displays that support it.

Apple is very proud of the speakers, mic, and webcams that are included in the studio display. The A13 chip that powers the audio and camera system is the same as the one used in the iPhone 11, and the camera is a 12-megapixel sensor with an f/2.4 lens. Apple says the speakers can support spatial audio.

The mic and speakers sound great. Really, really great. You can adjust the three-mic array to do voice isolation or not in Control Center, and you will sound better on calls than any conference mics I have ever heard. If you're regularly recording and streaming to an audience, you're not going to need anything else. The speakers are loud and deep, and even though I am not entirely convinced that spatial audio in music is anything but a gimmick and even less convinced that anything like a stereo speaker system located in front of you, Apple, audio can be produced by a stereo speaker system located in front of you These are the best speakers I have ever heard.

I don't know what's going on with this webcam. This thing just looks awful because Apple has a long history of producing amazing images with A-series chips.

It looks terrible in both light and low light. I've tried it on my MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio and it produces a noisy, blurry image. It is the same sad image quality that I tried in a number of programs. The Center Stage feature that follows you around the room doesn't help. It doesn't help if portrait mode is turned on and off.

I have sent Apple many pictures of our Mac Studio and Studio Display review units in various lighting conditions, and at the time, Apple's team looked into the images, but they couldn't tell me. Improvements will be made in a software update.

There is no timetable on that update, nor any information on what it might improve.

Our rule has always been to review products based on what we have in front of us and never against the promise of a future software update, and I simply wouldn't want to use this camera. The new MacBook Pro and M1 iMac have better cameras than what we are seeing here. I am hopeful that Apple will improve things via software in the future, but I will not buy this display until that happens.

The $300 nanotexture option smudges easily and is hard to clean, but there are people like our video director who absolutely love it. It's one of those things that you probably already know if you need it, it's for professional users with demanding color applications.

The studio display comes with a braided Thunderbolt 4 cable in the box, which can deliver 96W of power to a laptop, enough to charge my 16-inch MacBook Pro. The rear of the display has a Thunderbolt 4 port on it, as well as three other ports for peripherals. There are ports! People like them.

It is rare for an Apple product to be such a miss, but the Studio Display is. If the webcam actually delivered on the promise of quality video, it would at least prompt a debate about whether having local dimming or a variable refresh rate was worth it. If you want to have a 5K display connected to your Mac, it's still the best option. I think you are better off looking somewhere else.