[Teknoman117]

If your livelihood isn't dependent on that kind of a display, personally, I would try to avoid falling into their trap. I'd call it anti-competitive to have previously supported an industry standard, only to then remove that support and push their product as the only way to achieve an equivalent to that standard.

I'm not saying the ProDisplay XDR isn't a good screen, or even overpriced in the class of displays it lives in, but there is a major leap between "I write code/documents/etc. all day and like vibrant monitors" and "I do professional multimedia work and need hyper-accurate displays to do my job correctly."

Telling all the people who want HDR to go buy a $5,000 display they don't need is a bit of a mean spirited move.

[justin66]

> Telling all the people who want HDR to go buy a $5,000 display they don't need is a bit of a mean spirited move.

Plus an extra $1,000 for the stand to mount it. That never stops being funny.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I wonder whether we might get to witness audience booing again for another outrageous Apple product as pre-recorded Apple events works great for their goals.

[klodolph]

I think the Pro Display XDR & stand were less “outrageous” and more “aimed at a niche market most of us don’t know much about.” People were expecting something consumer / prosumer and Apple made something aimed at the professional market.

[Abishek_Muthian]

> “aimed at a niche market most of us don’t know much about.”

Then Apple should have demonstrated the $1000 stand to those niche market separately instead of trying to sell the aspiration of 'Pro' devices to the consumer in an usual consumer event.

[klodolph]

Apple didn’t announce it at an event for general consumers, they announced it at WWDC. WWDC is an Apple event, run by Apple, to announce Apple products. Not all Apple products are aimed at general consumers.

[biaachmonkie]

Yeah, that's what got me about the announcement, like how could they totally "misread the room" so to speak? At their Developer conference they announce that "overpriced display" ( overpriced for developer audience ). And the $1000 stand was possibly the most tone-deaf product announcement ever from them, just totally the wrong time and place for that.

What I don't get is why they have never just simply taken the 5K display from the iMac and made it a standalone display, Displayport has been able to handle the bandwidth for years now, HDMI can handle it now as well.

[Abishek_Muthian]

You're right, I stand corrected. It was a WWDC, hence original reaction from audience as opposed to usual scripted applause/laughter/camera pans.

[rollcat]

If only all "Pro" Apple products were actually aimed at professionals. The trashcan was a disaster. The MBP line continues to be a sad joke.

[klodolph]

Seems less like it’s funny, and more like it’s aimed at a niche market.

[kwyjobojoe]

How to does breaking existing compatibility with 3rd party products fit in to that?

[klodolph]

Are we still talking about a monitor stand? You can VESA mount the monitor if you don’t want to buy the stand. I think it’s assumed you’d use a third-party VESA mount, and the stand is there as an alternative for the few people who just don’t want that.. As far as I can tell, you can use a standard VESA mount, you don’t need some kind of Apple-specific one.

[justin66]

> As far as I can tell, you can use a standard VESA mount, you don’t need some kind of Apple-specific one.

To connect a VESA mount to the magnetic mount on the back of the Pro Display XDR, you would require Apple's $200 VESA mount adapter.

[brokenmachine]

It's dongles all the way down!

[FireBeyond]

Precisely. I'd be very happy to have a ProDisplay. I may even buy it for the aesthetics (well, above and beyond everything else - I'm also a professional photographer). But as you say, it's more the attitude. I'm guessing whatever proprietary stuff they've done to drive the XDR at 6K in HDR isn't compatible with DSC, and there's little interest in fixing it.

[pram]

XDR uses DSC on any RDNA (5X00) card, it’s not proprietary.

[FireBeyond]

Which makes me wonder even more why DSC is completely non-functional for any other monitor under Big Sur and Monterey.

[stefan_]

The M1 still does DDC, it just doesn't end up exposing the raw bus to software. Which is a perfectly reasonable decision.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> Which is a perfectly reasonable decision

Why is that "reasonable"?

How does it ultimately benefit end-users when they can no-longer use userland software to control their monitor via DDC?

[stefan_]

It's a raw bus? It's like an operating systems idea of a network stack being to hand all software raw ethernet access. It is an obvious concurrency disaster once you have more than one application trying to access it, the data transmitted and control handed over is entirely opaque to the operating system (god knows what monitor vendors sneak over DDC) and most importantly all of these are absurdly low level implementation details that are subject to change.

For all you know, they don't even need DDC beyond the initial EDID setup and multiplex the I2C hardware to do something else and can't physically provide this interface anymore.

[Hello71]

https://www.google.com/search?q=macos+send+ethernet+frames&h...

if you have root access, you should be allowed to have raw device access. the problem seems to be that apple no longer believes in users owning their computers, if it ever did.

[oblio]

Daily reminder that Jobs wanted one of their early computers (Lisa? Mac? Can't remember) to be bolted shut, until he was persuaded otherwise. Similar story with Apple II and expansion slots.

It's in their nature. Apple was bound to invent the iPhone.

[breakfastduck]

They can. This entire article is about how they implemented it on M1 macs. Did you read it?

[nicoburns]

It doesn't sound like it works very well

[throwanem]

That it works at all is a major improvement, and the Raspberry Pi method is worth having as well; I've been working on something very similar since I got my M1 Mini and found ddcctl and Lunar unable to work there, but got little further than building the light sensor before other projects took priority - I expect I'll probably finish this one around the equinox.

My work laptop, an Intel Mac, displays to and controls brightness on the same monitor, but I've been using ddcctl with a trivial wrapper script much more than Lunar of late. (Kinda feel a little bad about that, what with the author of Lunar having taken the time to give me tech support on a weird corner case here on HN a while back.) Still going to buy a license and, if I can find a way, set up a recurring donation. This kind of work deserves support.

[alin23]

Hey, thank you for the support!

I completely understand when users go with something more simple like a CLI or MonitorControl. I do the same myself when I don’t really need the features of a complex app.

By the way, I’m not sure if I understood correctly but if you need an external ambient light sensor, Lunar supports that out of the box now: https://lunar.fyi/sensor

[_abox]

It would be reasonable if Apple themselves implemented a way to control the display settings like that.

[smoldesu]

Why didn't they abstract it, or create a stripped/safe userland option to replace it? If I'm relying on a Mac for work, I can't have them removing essential features from my computer in a simple upgrade. Maybe MacOS needs semantic versioning, or at least some level of communication with the end user about compatibility.

[slrz]

This was never an intended feature. If I understand the article correctly, they were using an undocumented ("private") API which happened to stop working.

[smoldesu]

Every API is undocumented on MacOS, what do you want them to do? How are you supposed to discern between zombie XNU code and Good LTS Apple Compliant code?

[brokenmachine]

Rule of thumb: if you paid for an official Apple dongle, all related code is LTS (*until said dongle is deprecated on a whim, of course).