Apple Studio Display review: the perfect match for any Mac

Right now, I have three other displays connected to the Mac Studio sitting on my desk, two Dell 27″ 4K monitors and one Lenovo 32″ 4K OLED. They’re fine, aesthetically, but they just don’t have the same panache. They don’t distract from my environment’s aesthetic, but they don’t add anything, either. The Studio Display does just that. It makes my setup look better, which no other monitor I’ve used or reviewed has done.

And the Studio Display has the typical meticulous Apple construction. It’s all aluminum, to begin with, which as with many Apple products just makes it feel like it’s worth more. It’s a solid-looking and -feeling construction as well, with a density that plastic constructions can’t match. The other monitors I’ve reviewed, and the ones I used that I mention above, are all solid enough but they just don’t exude quality in the same fashion.

My review unit had the simple tilt-adjustable stand, and the mechanism is smooth as silk. There’s also a tilt- and height-adjustable stand option that I’m sure is just as buttery smooth. The VESA mount adapter is also a configuration option. This choice must be made when you order the Studio Display, because as far as I know, it can’t be changed later. In this respect, the Studio Display feels a lot like MacBooks that have the smoothest hinges around.

I’ll add another point. Unboxing displays is generally a pain. The packaging can be Byzantine, and putting things together requires carefully placing the panel somewhere and connecting the stand. Then, putting everything back together to ship back to the manufacturer is like trying to put together a puzzle, only one where if you don’t align things perfectly you risk damaging something expensive.

Apple’s packaging is unparalleled in its consistency and its ease of opening and, importantly, putting things back. You just pull the usual Apple tabs to open the box, and then when you set it down, the sides swing out to provide easy access to the Studio Display. And, it comes already put together, with plenty of space to lift it out of the box and simply place it on a desk. It’s a great experience, and I never felt like I ran the risk of breaking something.

Minimal ports, minimal features

The Studio Display is quite different. It has just four USB-C ports, one upstream with Thunderbolt 3 for connecting to a PC and three downstream running at up to 10 Gbps for connecting other peripherals. That’s kind of a hub, I guess, but it’s not nearly as functional as some others. The upstream port can power up to a MacBook Pro 14, which is a good thing. And if you have several Apple devices, you can use Apple’s Continuity features to share displays, keyboards, and mice. But if you’re a Windows user, you’re out of luck.

And here’s what really makes the Studio Display less attractive to Windows PC users. Unlike the vast majority of monitors — maybe virtually all of them — the Studio Display has no on-screen display (OSD) for configuring settings. In fact, there aren’t that many settings to configure, and they’re all controlled using the macOS Settings app. There seem to be some hacks that will let you change various settings on a Windows PC, but I simply wouldn’t recommend buying a Studio Display to use with Windows. Some things will work with Windows via standard USB devices, like the speakers and the webcam, but controls are minimal.

On macOS, the settings are more meaningful but well behind many other monitors. You can change the resolution, adjust the gamut, and control the white point. Compared to other monitors, though, your control over the finer points of the Studio Display’s performance are quite limited. Really, that fits the Apple ethos, where plugging into a Mac gives you near-perfect performance out of the box but with lesser ability to fine tune things. There are a number of reference modes available to fit various purposes (photo editing, video editing, and web), but outside of selecting the mode you can’t really dig into the details.

The good thing is that what features do exist are excellent. Take the audio, for example. These aren’t just a couple of speakers added in as an afterthought. It’s a six-speaker system, with force-cancelling woofers, supporting Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio powered by an A13 Bionic chip. And the audio is fantastic, much better than you get from any other monitor I’ve used or tested. I have a separate pair of Logitech speakers that are pretty decent, but I’m putting those in the closet for as long as I’m using the Studio Display. The audio is just that good, and I love saving some desk space.

The 12MB webcam is also great, with lovely video quality and great low-light performance. It supports Apple’s Center Stage feature that keeps you nicely framed as you move around. I’ll also be putting my standalone webcam away, because the Studio Displays’ version is so much better.

Ultimately, in a sense, the Studio Display is bare-bones in terms of features and functionality. But like so many Apple products, what’s there just works supremely well. The monitor follows Apple’s mantra of “it just works” perfectly, and if you have a Mac and all but the most demanding requirements, you’ll likely be quite happy.

The Studio Display is built around a 27-inch IPS panel running at 5K (5120 x 2880) resolution and supporting Apple’s True Tone technology that adjusts the display for the ambient lighting. It supports 1 billion colors, P3 wide color, and promises up to 600 nits of brightness, which is a lot for an external display. Apple doesn’t list a contrast ratio in its materials, but digging around looks like it’s rated at 1,200:1. Importantly, the 5K resolution perfectly matches Apple’s HiDPI implementation, providing the sharpest possible image and the best text quality — something that other resolutions cannot do.

I used my colorimeter to test the display, and the result vary widely based on which preset is enabled. With the default, this is a very good display. It’s very bright at 584 nits, almost matching the specifications and being much brighter than any other external IPS display I’ve tested. The MSI Modern MD271UL display I reviewed came in at 376 nits, above our 300-nit standard but not nearly as bright as the Studio Display. Colors were similar, with Apple’s panel coming in at 100% sRGB, 88% AdobeRGB, and 99% DCI-P3, compared to the MSI at 100%, 89%, and 97% respectively. And the Studio Display’s color accuracy was very good at a DeltaE of 1.48, compared to the MSI’s 1.84. Contrast was just short of our 1,000:1 threshold at 910:1, but blacks still looked excellent without even a tinge of gray.

When you select a preset, brightness is locked in at a lower level and colors are optimized for the task. The Photography preset, for example, drops brightness to 157 nits and color accuracy improves to 1.24 (1.0 or less is indistinguishable to the human eye). Contrast remains close to the same at 900:1. The Digital Cinema (DCI-P3) present also drops brightness and contrast falls off to 810:1 and color accuracy bumps up to a DeltaE of 2.07.

I didn’t test every preset, but you get the drift. Selecting a preset locks the monitor into a distinct quality level that Apple clearly thinks is best. I didn’t bother calibrating the display, because I doubt that things would have gotten any better if I had.

As it is, display quality is excellent. Brightness, colors, and contrast are all excellent, you have True Tone if you want it, and you’ll get the sharpest image when mated with a Mac. And it’s all drop-dead easy to optimize for your task. I reviewed the standard glass model, but there’s also a nano-textured glass option that scatters light to further minimize glare. I’ve tried it with the latest MacBook Pro 16, and I wouldn’t mind using that model.

One important note is that the Studio Display doesn’t support high dynamic range (HDR) video. That will matter for gamers and media consumers, although I found both to be very good experiences with the Studio Display. If HDR is important to you, then you’re out of luck with this one.

As a writer, I love the Studio Display for its unmatched text sharpness. My other displays are fine, but there can be some fuzziness that the Studio Display avoids. I’m not a photographer or video editor, though, so colors don’t matter as much. And I have an OLED display for when they do, and for the inky blacks and awesome HDR performant that only OLED provides.

Is it the right monitor for you? Well, that depends on how much you value that perfect match of resolutions, the color quality and brightness, and the ease of use (contrasted with minimal configuration options). Is it worth a starting price of $1,599? I think it is, but you can get very good monitors for considerably less. My recommendation and rating here, therefore, is highly dependent on price sensitivity — as is likely the case with many of Apple’s products.