Apple’s new Studio Displays may have fixed their biggest flaws – for a price
The Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR are a pair of swanky 5K displays designed to work flawlessly with modern Macs
It’s been almost four years since the last Apple Studio Display. And it wasn’t great. The Pro Display XDR has been hanging around even longer, having rocked up way back in 2019. But Apple has finally stopped avoiding that nagging task lurking in Reminders and refreshed its entire display lineup with the Apple Studio Display (2026) and Studio Display XDR.
The Apple Studio Display still looks like someone lopped the chin off an iMac. Which is fine – the display always looked great. Alas, the panel is still 60Hz, although improved LED backlighting nudges brightness up to a maximum of 600 nits rather than 500. The 12MP Center Stage camera, seemingly imported from the iMac, represents a bigger jump and should propel that feature from eye-poppingly bad to actually rather lovely.
Elsewhere, the speakers reportedly deliver deeper bass, and the unit has two Thunderbolt 5 and two USB-C ports, replacing the old single Thunderbolt 3 and 3x USB-C. That means faster charging for MacBook Pros, speedier accessories connectivity, and daisy-chaining up to four displays if you 1) happen to be rich, and 2) think you’re some kind of hacker in a TV spy thriller.
The price for all this? A still quite wallet-thumpy $1599/£1499. You can pre-order on 4 March. The displays start landing a week later.
ProMotion slickness
The new Studio Display XDR effectively replaces 2019’s Pro Display XDR. And if you think 27in just isn’t enough, tough. Unlike the older 32in unit, this new XDR is the same size as the standard Studio Display.
Crack one open, though, and you’d invalidate your warranty. And also find upgraded innards. The mini-LED backlight’s 2304 dimming zones enable extreme contrast, and ramp up to 1000 nits for SDR content and 2000 nits for HDR. Adobe RGB colour gamut support should placate designers grumbling about their missing five inches.
This swankier unit also finally gets us a 120Hz Apple display that’s not on a laptop, phone or tablet, with adaptive sync letting it dip as low as 47Hz. So that should mean a properly fluid, snappy UI – and make those several people who resolutely game only on their Macs deliriously happy.
Like its sort-of predecessor, the new Studio Display XDR appears to have the same tilt-and-height adjustable stand, which was a delight when I last tried it. And it probably should be, because this spendier display will set you back a whopping $3299/£2999. Still, that’s cheaper than the Pro Display XDR, which started at $4999 and cost an extra grand for the stand.
Speaking of which, you can add the fancier stand to the standard Apple Studio Display – and for a more reasonable $400/£400. And both displays offer a $300/£300 nano-texture option, for use in challenging lighting conditions. Like when you have to work in a park because you had to sell your house to pay for all this new Apple gear.
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
