A funny thing happened when Apple stopped making external displays for Macs: The competition did not rush in to steal Apple’s thunder. It was almost like Apple had itself invalidated the entire category.
But after Apple shipped the Studio Display in 2022, the competition seemed to heat back up. It’s almost as if the opportunity to compete with Apple (and undercut it on price) was enough of a motivation to get in the game. Today, there aren’t a ton of displays that have Mac-appropriate screen resolutions out there, but there are far more than there were back in 2021. If you’ve bought a Mac-friendly display that wasn’t made by Apple in the last four years, you probably owe thanks to the Studio Display anyway.
Now here’s the successor to the 2022 Apple Studio Display… the 2026 Apple Studio Display. While it does offer a few improvements over its predecessor, perhaps the most important thing about it is that it remains a product in Apple’s line-up—and provides a target for other display makers to outdo.
A mildly upgraded display
As someone who owns two of the 2022-vintage Apple Studio Displays, it’s hard for me to say that the new model is very different. It looks the same, and the most important feature of the product—the 5K LCD panel—seems to be the same.
This is not to say it isn’t a good panel. It is. It’s not going to offer the peak brightness, HDR features, and refresh rate of fancier displays (including the displays on MacBook Pros), but a lot of users don’t need those features. I never miss ProMotion when I’m sitting in front of a Studio Display, for instance.
But it’s also almost the same panel that debuted with the 5K iMac more than a decade ago. I guess this shows that displays can remain viable for a very long time, but Apple has shown no interest in upgrading the Studio Display to improve it in any of the ways it’s improved the stock display on a MacBook Pro.
Apple has upgraded the most controversial component in the original Studio Display: Its 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, which didn’t look great in low light and many other situations because pretty much every image that came out of it had to be cropped. The new camera is still 12 megapixels, but Apple says it has larger pixels and a wider aperture—and in head-to-head comparisons, yes, it looks much better.
Thunderbolt support on the new models has been upgraded to Thunderbolt 5, which is probably only relevant if you’re daisy-chaining multiple devices together. The fact that you can daisy-chain devices is because of what might be the single biggest upgrade to the display: a second Thunderbolt port. So if you want to run two Studio Displays, you can plug a computer into one, and then run a cable from that one to the other one. (I did this with my old Studio Display and the new one, and it worked like a charm.)
The whole thing is powered by an A19 chip, which is an upgrade from the A13 in the older model… However, these chips are really irrelevant when it comes to the user. Apple’s reaching into its existing bin of parts to build these devices, but they don’t really take advantage of the computing power, nor do they get in the way of you using them as dumb displays. (It is something to think that the Studio Display has more computing power and memory than a MacBook Neo… and yet you can’t do anything with that. Wouldn’t it be nice if it did something, like maybe offer an Apple TV mode so you could watch videos on it without needing to attach a Mac?)
Does it make sense?
These are meager upgrades that allow Apple to keep the Studio Display on the price list for years to come, but don’t really advance it in many meaningful ways. If you’ve already got a Studio Display, there’s no real reason to upgrade it to this model. And at $1599, it’s not a very good buy if you’re willing to shop around and buy a non-Apple monitor.
The Asus ProArt Display PA27JCV lists for $799, and I found it on sale at Amazon for $729. It’s a 5K 27-inch display with an adjustable screen and Mac-friendly controls. Is it as nice as Apple’s display? Almost certainly not, but it’s also half the price.
So if Asus will sell you a pretty nice 5K 27-inch display for half of what Apple is charging, why does the Studio Display exist?
I think it exists because some people really don’t want to shop around and like the fact that Apple makes products that really integrate nicely with other Apple products. If you’re at the Apple Store (in person or online) and buy a new Mac, you can add a Studio Display right then and there. Some people aren’t really interested in shopping around and saving money. And yes, Apple’s fit and finish will almost always be better than the competition: I considered buying an LG UltraFine display instead of a Studio Display and decided I’d rather pay a small premium to get the really nice Apple display. (Then again, the UltraFine didn’t cost half of the Studio Display back then.)
Anyway, the Studio Display is nice. But it feels like it should be better, or cheaper, or both. But it’s neither. I have bought two, and I still like them. But if I needed to buy a new display right now, I’d look at other options.
Take a stand… please
Apple claims it’s a champion of accessibility. But in my opinion, part of accessibility is ergonomics. Different people need displays at different heights, and we are all shaped differently. Apple’s continued insistence on shipping displays and iMacs that aren’t height-adjustable by default is frustrating. You spend all this money on a pricey Apple display and then, what, put it on an old dictionary? Meanwhile, even the cut-rate competition offers height adjustments.
The review unit Studio Display Apple sent me came with the height-adjustable display, and it’s glorious. That thing is a smooth, pivoting marvel of mechanical engineering, and Apple should be proud of how nice it feels to use. But it’s essentially a failure, because it adds $400 to the price of the already-expensive display. Apple should be working to engineer affordable ergonomic features on its displays and iMacs, not building luxury stands that make a $800 display cost $2000.
If Apple wants to charge users more for a smooth, luxury display stand, who am I to stop them? But basic height adjustment should be built in, period.
A lukewarm take
Apple addressed the biggest issue with the Studio Display by swapping in a new webcam that looks a lot better than the one in the old model. That’s great. What the company didn’t address is the fact that the Studio Display felt like it was selling outmoded display technology for a cutting-edge price—and it still does.
If you want to buy a Studio Display because you love the Apple aesthetic or because it’s just convenient to do so, I can’t stop you. But anyone willing to put up with non-Apple annoyances in order to save more than the cost of a MacBook Neo might want to shop around. As for me, I hope the next Studio Display update is more meaningful than this tepid set of improvements.