[theonemind]

I think this works like the opposite of a loss-leader, a product sold at a loss to draw people into a store, and/or like minor upsells at restaurants, like guacamole on the side.

I got this theory from the Apple Explained youtube channel when he talked about the $600 wheels for Mac Pros

Apple needs some high end items to keep its luxury appeal, but they really want the middle market without losing some perceived luxury appeal.

So you have a few items with crazy prices that won't sell well to keep up your brand image. Interesting that these land on not-necessarily-deal-breaker things, like can you roll your computer? Can you adjust your monitor height? Extras, stuff you could live without or work around (especially being able to roll your mac pro)

I don't think they expect to make a serious profit on the option. It's some kind of microeconomics thing. It might make the non-adjustable option look more attractive price-wise.

[dangus]

This product is absolutely for the same kind of people who shop at Restoration Hardware, Gucci, Cartier, etc.

If it was for creative pros, it would have HDR. A $1600 monitor with no HDR, can you believe it? You can buy an entire laptop with an HDR mini-LED monitor from Apple for very nearly the same price. The base model iPhone mini can shoot in HDR but you can't play it back on the brand new Apple StUdIo MoNiToR from 2022.

[apetrovic]

> A $1600 monitor with no HDR, can you believe it?

Is there a good alternative for reasonably calibrated 27" monitor, with 5K resolution, integrated (96W) USB-C hub that have camera, good speakers and HDR? How much that monitor costs?

[dangus]

Here's a list:

https://www.displayninja.com/mini-led-monitor-list/

ASUS ProArt is a good start:

https://www.asus.com/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ProArt/ProAr...

- 4K HDR, 576 zones of local dimming

- 90W power

- Dolby Vision, HDR-10

- Works with Mac or PC so you aren't screwed if you have a multi-platform environment, includes DisplayPort, HDMI, USB-A (4x), USB-C, headphone jack

For the same price as the Studio Display with stand upgrade ($1999) it seems like a better monitor. I guess it depends on whether you'd rather have 5K over 4K compared to HDR and mini-LED. For video production something like the ProArt seems like a no-brainer.

Speakers and a good camera are not selling points for displays. A solid webcam costs $50. Professionals aren't going to rely on monitor speakers, they're gonna spend <$100 and get something like the Sony MDR7506 studio monitors.

The Apple Studio Display is 100% made for your VP of Sales to put in his home office and look at.

[nebula8804]

>ASUS ProArt

As someone who got suckered into buying two of these pieces of junk let me warn you that while the panel is decent, everything around it royally sucks.

1. The stand is horrible and tends to be very wobbly. This has been the case with three ASUS monitors I have owned over the years (two of them being ProArt)

2. Lack of supports around the screen makes it extremely fragile. Example: I carefully placed the screen face down on the table for less than 10 seconds just to wipe of the dust in the back with a cloth and when I lifted it up, the screen was cracked :/

3. The boot up time is atrocious. I have timed it:

7 seconds just to get from a black screen to the slow ASUS animation logo to appear(because you must know who made this junk every time you turn this thing on.)

Then another 23 seconds back to black until it actually initializes and displays the desktop.

4. The worst possible thing of it all: The darn thing cannot properly resume from sleep half the time. On multiple different machines(Windows + Mac), I am required to switch to another input on the convoluted rear OSD menu buttons, wait another ~20 seconds, and then switch back (another ~20 seconds).

Then like an idiot I bought another one of these monitors after the first one broke because I got an unbelievable deal on this monitor on ebay(800$ price vs $5000 list price): ASUS Proart PA32UCG. This is supposedly a direct competitor to the apple XDR display and was given great reviews by this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfkUpcF5cZw

It has all the same problems as the other Proart Displays. How can they get away with charging thousands of dollars for this thing?!

>Speakers and a good camera are not selling points for displays. A solid webcam costs $50. Professionals aren't going to rely on monitor speakers, they're gonna spend <$100 and get something like the Sony MDR7506 studio monitors.

Man I really hate when people trot out nonsense like this and just dismiss things like good speakers or a built in webcam. First of all, the speakers on these ProArt displays are flat out useless. Unless you are playing OS sound effects, just forget about it. They are so underpowered and blur out the audio that you can't use it for anything else. Second of all, you now have even more junk to put on your table. With just a little bit of effort, they could have engineered a solution that is at least somewhat comparable to Apple but they couldn't even be bothered to do that even in 2022.

I will actively avoid ASUS after this experience. They still have a long way to go from their OEM manufacturing roots.

[dangus]

IMO, ASUS is taking the right path here. Everything besides the panel doesn't matter.

This particular model or lineup might not be the best, and maybe the QA sucks, but it's not like the 69% of people on Amazon giving it 4+ stars have gone crazy.

I see this another way: these ASUS displays are a firmware update away from being a better buy, and ASUS is just one competitor.

My prediction is that the Studio Display pretty quickly becomes a questionable purchase as more competitors enter the space and mini-LED displays become more prevalent. It's going to be a great webcam and speaker and a mediocre monitor at that price.

Also, if webcams and speakers are so important I wonder why the Pro Display XDR doesn't have either?

Honestly, that question lines up with my original claim: that the Studio Display is an aspirational purchase for non-creatives who have a lot of money and want a nice home office monitor for fiddling with spreadsheets and taking Zoom calls. The actual professionals (Pro Display XDR) don't have any need for some impressive for their size but not studio monitor built in monitor speakers and webcam.

Someone producing semi-professional video content is going to go with a display that supports HDR, especially considering that our consumer-level phones already record HDR footage.

[nebula8804]

You are making a lot of stretches to justify your point of view.

>This particular model or lineup might not be the best, and maybe the QA sucks, but it's not like the 69% of people on Amazon giving it 4+ stars have gone crazy.

Just glancing on Amazon, if you filter by 1 star reviews you get a listing of all the problems I mentioned. Your argument assumes that all the people praising it did not just base their review on initial impressions. You only notice most of my problems after living with the monitor for some time. Since all of my issues are cropping up in the 1 star reviews, I suspect that at least some of the positive reviews are people who were wowed by the initial panel quality.

>I see this another way: these ASUS displays are a firmware update away from being a better buy, and ASUS is just one competitor.

A firmware update that will never happen for the existing models. I checked my monitor in the hopes of fixing this dumb issue with the input detection and one of them actually has updates...just to add promised features after the first few models shipped from the factory without it. The other two? Nothing. in other words, once they fulfilled what the specs say, you are on your own.

I also fail to see how the poor stand/speakers can be firmware updated. That is something a daily user will have to live with.

It would be nice if there were multiple competitors but the real reason I purchased ASUS was due to a lack of competitors. I typically purchase Dell.

>My prediction is that the Studio Display pretty quickly becomes a questionable purchase as more competitors enter the space and mini-LED displays become more prevalent. It's going to be a great webcam and speaker and a mediocre monitor at that price.

This dumb argument is always made by Apple detractors/Android/PC fanboys. They only look at specs and fail to consider the product as a whole. I learned this lesson the hard way after 4 years of terrible Nexus phones.

If you think about it, you are getting exactly what you are paying for: Good panel in exchange for poor enclosure, poor firmware, poor stand, poor speakers. This does not seem like a deal unless you value all of those things at 0 which you are clearly doing. I concede that some low cost studios may adopt this for their workflow although I don't know if these panels are truly Dolby Vision certified given their lighting zones algorithms are pretty lousy in my experience. If you want to ensure you are getting quality, especially as an Apple user, the other panels are a no brainer. They have a reputation you can trust, ASUS does not.

>Also, if webcams and speakers are so important I wonder why the Pro Display XDR doesn't have either?

I'm not sure. The XDR is just a little over 2 years old so it is definitely plausible that it was intended as a 1st gen design to replace the LG display that everyone was complaining about(there were massive failure rates of that display so Apple needed something new for their new Desktop machine which was unveiled with the monitor).

[Joeri]

I am assuming the studio display will support EDR with its 600 nits of peak brightness, so while it may not be hdr, it is not quite sdr either.

For those who don’t know, EDR works like this: when the built-in display of a supported mac is not at full brightness when playing HDR content it will ramp up the brightness to max to make use of the full range of the display for the HDR content while also dimming all non-HDR content to keep it at the same apparent brightness. The effect can be quite dramatic if you’re using the display at a low brightness setting, even on a 500 nit 5K iMac. The hdr content looks much brighter than a white finder window.

https://prolost.com/blog/edr

[npteljes]

Let's attach a name to the thing: price anchoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

[goplayoutside]

"They make their pride in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little." -- Thoreau.

[mgh2]

Consumer

Analogy: A digital scale https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/metallic-digital-scale-gold-gol...

Does the design look familiar? If I want to keep motivated on my health goals (checking at least once a day), it better look good or at least welcoming, because my mind subconsciously equates this device to my image and identity. Study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281...

There is a psychological and behavioral aspect playing here. Extrapolate this to a monitor that will be used for ~8 hrs a day, will design and its effect on productivity matter more? Brand or luxury appeal matters for consumer products, but these might not be Studio's target demographic.

Enterprise

If users are office workers then IT professionals in charge of office equipment ($ decision makers) are the target demographic. If this is WFH/remote work, then it is working professionals investing in a home office. Both demographics can spend thousands on chairs, desks & gear, why not monitors?

As upsells, will these monitor arms make the worker more productive? Will buying them from the same manufacturer/brand ease installation minutiae that will possibly impact ergonomics and productivity long term?

These are just all hypotheses worth pondering when it comes to Apple's design and business decisions.

[David0Selznick]

the studio display is the LG Ultrafine 5k displayport MST display in an aluminum shell.

studio display does not use the more advanced displayport 1.4 compression in the 32" 6k xdr. Apple is effectively selling a panel that first came out in 2014 when imac 5k was introduced.

You can even argue the base Studio Display is overpriced because 10th gen imac 27" 5k with the same panel plus a whole computer is 1799

[buffington]

Funny thing is a 10th generation iMac with the 5k panel probably costs a lot less than $1799 these days. I can't even find it to buy on Apple's site. I'd guess you can find a refurbished, or new units outside of Apple, for a lot less than what the new Studio Display costs.

While it sounds a bit crazy, it might be worth going that route too.

I've been using a 27" 5k iMac mostly as a monitor for the entire pandemic so far. It's the biggest display I can fit between the closet walls I work from. It took some fiddling to get the setup right, but what I ended up with works really well for me:

* I remote into my work machine using the built in Screen Sharing app (which is really just a VNC client)

* The remote machine is connected to the iMac over ethernet and sits on a shelf above me in the closet

* I use macFuse and sshfs so that the work machine's drives can be mounted on the iMac

I rarely, if ever, notice any image quality issues or input lag with this setup. The directly wired network connection helps with that.

Aside from the benefits of the display (which, to this day, is still the best I've ever used), you get a full computer.

That means I can have a video call going on on the work machine, CPU pegged, while the iMac compiles stuff without competing for CPU.

Given the $1599 price of the Studio Display, and used 5k iMacs near me going for about $700, it's a no brainer. I'd still go this route if I were wanting a new high resolution monitor.

[evanelias]

They silently discontinued the 27" imac yesterday: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/8/22967616/apple-27-inch-ima...

[prewett]

According to LG's website, the only 27" 5k display actually on sale is $1300 (and it is out of stock), and it is not adjustable, does not have a 12 Mpx camera, and does not have fancy speakers. Given how impressive the 2018 MBP speakers are, I expect the Studio Display probably sounds pretty good. $1600 seems like a reasonable price for all that.

[Abishek_Muthian]

> Apple needs some high end items to keep its luxury appeal, but they really want the middle market without losing some perceived luxury appeal.

i.e. An aspirational brand. Judging from the way people are willing to sell their kidney to buy an iPhone in developing countries, Where Apple doesn't follow differentiated pricing like everyone else, even if they manufacture the phone there[1] I guess this has worked great for Apple & its shareholders.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610454#30611568

[mgh2]

Two theories

[1] Luxury: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBHY_Qaw5AI&ab_channel=Marqu...

[2] Target demographic: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/here-is...

I am more convinced by the business argument, both only cater to a small market of high-end spenders

[donarb]

This is nothing new, even Wal-Mart does it, it's retail selling 101.