Agreed. Me neither. People likening the firmware on most monitors to the complete iOS that’s on these monitors and that requires all this extra mucking around, and introduces all this overhead and tendency for instability, are fooling themselves.
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Apple Releases Studio Display Firmware Update to Fix Speaker Issue
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Ca. 10.5 Tiger and 10.6 Leopard.
See, among others, these sections:
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Apple's latest OS X release (10.4) is about to hit the streets. Tiger brings a …
arstechnica.com
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
After a two-and-a-half-year wait, Leopard is here. John Siracusa covers the …
arstechnica.com
Much of this never shipped; instead, we got a more reliable but less flexible subset.
Umm its not about groups, its about the quality of implementation of the cam. I like centre stage but as a result the camera quality has been compromised. And like I said, its not a deal breaker, but my image is potatoesque which isn't great for what otherwise is a stellar product. The iMac 24 has a great cam and if you watch apples marketing you'd think it was at least on par with that which it isn't. Nothing divisive here, it is what it is.
Just saw this update and did it. My studio display, which I got in April I think, from Costco, is a great monitor but... these updates brick it for some reason. With the first update a few months back I could not un-brick it no matter what I tried and I had to take it to the Apple Store. Come on, it's a display. I had a Thunderbolt Display for 10 years (awesome monitor) with not a single issue. At least the Apple Store got my display working in a few hours... Then there was another update maybe a month or two later. Bricked again; but that time I unplugged everything (including cable from monitor to mac mini) waited a few minutes, then replugged; after 5 minutes or so it unbricked itself, thank god.
I dunno why -- obviously I'm dumb -- but I went ahead with this latest update. Bricked again! However, this time the fix was: unplug everything. wait a few minutes. hold down power button on mac mini to turn it off. reconnect everything. power up mac mini. voila, updated computer and monitor and working monitor. weird.
anyway, in response to some of the folks who have had audio issues, maybe two months ago my monitor started playing sound about 5 seconds later than picture (on youtube, for instance). Restarting everything fixed that issue. Hopefully this firmware update has that fixed for good.
All in all, great monitor, but weirdly unreliable, especially after that Thunderbolt Display was one of the great computer thingys of all time.
I dunno why -- obviously I'm dumb -- but I went ahead with this latest update. Bricked again! However, this time the fix was: unplug everything. wait a few minutes. hold down power button on mac mini to turn it off. reconnect everything. power up mac mini. voila, updated computer and monitor and working monitor. weird.
anyway, in response to some of the folks who have had audio issues, maybe two months ago my monitor started playing sound about 5 seconds later than picture (on youtube, for instance). Restarting everything fixed that issue. Hopefully this firmware update has that fixed for good.
All in all, great monitor, but weirdly unreliable, especially after that Thunderbolt Display was one of the great computer thingys of all time.
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Did you have any other devices plugged into the ASD while the update was being applied?
Yepppp. Describes my experience (including the Costco purchase) very closely. Was kicking myself for applying this update after having trouble with the previous two. All I had connected was my relatively new Macbook.
Huh, good question. Nothing attached I think but I do have a USB (wireless, logitech) keyboard and mouse.
Yes, that's true. 👍
Anything is possible, especially with Apple. 🤷♂️
Are you able to prove that? 🤔
Thankfully, not everybody is having a terrible experience. The large amount of features in the Apple Studio Display have resulted in the "overhead" that you've mentioned.
Oh, wow! That's extremely interesting! Thanks for sharing!Ca. 10.5 Tiger and 10.6 Leopard.
See, among others, these sections:
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Apple's latest OS X release (10.4) is about to hit the streets. Tiger brings a …
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
After a two-and-a-half-year wait, Leopard is here. John Siracusa covers the …
Much of this never shipped; instead, we got a more reliable but less flexible subset.
Yes, I know that.
Apple never said that the webcam in the Apple Studio Display was on par with the 24-inch iMac. The latter also has Center Stage.
The Thunderbolt Display was a "dumb" monitor. The Apple Studio Display is a whole different beast. 🤷♂️
Just out of curiosity, what kind of MacBook was it? 🤔
You shouldn't be kicking yourself for simply just trying to apply an update. I'm sure it won't be as bad next time.
Were you able to check if that's the case? I'd like to see you troubleshoot the issue... 🧐
Yeah, that's a very important question. External accessories could've affected the Apple Studio Display.
Correct (they are plugged into the Mac Mini -- which is itself connected to the SD via thunderbolt cable of course -- via single USB receiver) but now that I think a bit more clearly, I realize that I do have two hard drives connected to the Studio Display's USB ports. You think they could mess up the update? I'll try to remember to disconnect them next time (but most likely I'll forget assuming it's a few months down the line, as Apple doesn't tell me to disconnect anything before updating).
Definitely disconnect your hard drives next time. I think that they might actually be the culprit! 🧐
It's certainly a whole different beast. I never had to cart the Thunderbolt Display to the Apple Store (the SD is a large, unwieldy item, easily damaged in getting it into the car, over the store, back to the car, back home, etc)
As for troubleshooting in my first firmware update go-round I called Apple support and they tried a few things over the phone to de-brick, but they never asked me about any external accessories. Of course I disconnected the two hard drives I have connected when I took it over to the Apple Store, but when I plugged it in over there (without the hard drives, to be clear) it was still bricked. What Apple told me on the phone was that I really needed a 2nd monitor to complete the update... but I don't have any 2nd monitor or laptop which can be connected to this thing. Now, if Apple would allow me to connect my iPad, maybe that would help.
Anyway, if you're interested in whether other people have this problem, back in April there were lots of people asking questions about it in Apple support forums. I haven't checked again this time around.
Let me see if I can quickly find an example for you... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253808766
I confess I'm a little confused about how to navigate Apple discussions these days. In the old days I think I could find a list of my own posts. Now I can't see how to do that, not quickly anyway... my bad...
Put me in the category of: I love this display and don't mind the cost if I get as many years out of it as I got out of the Thunderbolt Display, but a display that has software issues makes me nervous, and I've never been nervous at all about any monitor potentially failing...
I know you're referring to Apple's defaults for its own monitors, but Apple does offer non-integer scaling, it just doesn't look as good.
Does Windows' vectorized approach do any better when displaying text using non-integer scaling, or does it also suffer in sharpness compared to integer scaling? I've read that Windows actually can render pixel-perfect artifact-free text at any scaling resolution, but it seems that would necessitate trading off exact glyph shape (which to me seems a good trade-off, since I'd prefer that to the eye fatigue I get when text isn't really crisp).
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So, Windows takes any resolution, then renders stuff on it with the dpi you pick.
macOS takes any virtual resolution, then renders stuff on it with either 72 ppi or 144 ppi, then downscales that to the physical resolution. That’s where the blur comes in.
For example, if you have a 24-inch 4K display, to achieve Retina:
- you can ask Windows to treat the display as 4K, and scale the UI to 175% (not quite 2x).
- you can ask macOS to treat the display as 4.5K like the iMac. It’ll be slightly blurry, but close to 220 ppi.
For text, it’s like changing a font size. It’s layouting where it gets tricky; also, moving windows between different ppis is technically supported but rather buggy.
(edit) a few examples:
100%:
125%:
200%:
(there's a glitch here where the 'g' in the title bar gets cut off)
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I wonder if there's something with the Studio Displays Costco gets from Apple, I've gone through two of them and they both have an audio issue (sound just stops working, has to be unplugged daily) that the most recent firmware didn't fix.
Are you using unusual software for audio or video playback or special audio utilities? Have you modified any output detail settings?
The Audio Midi Setup utility allows sample rate selection for audio outputs and by default the ASD speakers are set to 48kHz there (macOS will automatically resample signals as needed). This should also determine the actual audio data rate that's sent to the ASD.
If it happens so regularly to you, does the issue behave differently if you select one of the other sampling frequencies there?
If your specific circumstances make the issue happen frequently across two different ASDs and even after the update the issue seems to be related more to your Mac, possibly to your software setup in some way, and it may be good for Apple to know about it.
I'm not using the ASD speakers normally (I've got separate speakers for that) but my suspicion is that it could be a slight data rate divergence issue which should normally be caught and resolved by the firmware or by macOS (either is possible) but isn't always resolved correctly for some reason, so sound data buffers run over or under at some point, causing glitches or a complete stop. Or some other protocol implementation bug somewhere.
I think you read my post too quickly....thats not what I said. And again, its not a deal breaker - its just unfortunateYes, that's true. 👍
Anything is possible, especially with Apple. 🤷♂️
Are you able to prove that? 🤔
Thankfully, not everybody is having a terrible experience. The large amount of features in the Apple Studio Display have resulted in the "overhead" that you've mentioned.
Oh, wow! That's extremely interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Yes, I know that.
Apple never said that the webcam in the Apple Studio Display was on par with the 24-inch iMac. The latter also has Center Stage.
The Thunderbolt Display was a "dumb" monitor. The Apple Studio Display is a whole different beast. 🤷♂️
Just out of curiosity, what kind of MacBook was it? 🤔
You shouldn't be kicking yourself for simply just trying to apply an update. I'm sure it won't be as bad next time.
Were you able to check if that's the case? I'd like to see you troubleshoot the issue... 🧐
Yeah, that's a very important question. External accessories could've affected the Apple Studio Display.
that the webcam image quality is subpar even compared to older iMacs on the studio display in what is otherwise a
brilliant monitor.
BUT funnily enough it does look like Apple has lowered the resolution on the video in the studio display section on its
website now - I see potato features, though they are not marketed as such ;p. Unless its because im now looking at it
on my 5k display as opposed to my 4k tv ;p ;p ;p
Thanks for the info, I’ll have to look into this. When audio stops working, I can’t change audio output or anything related so I’d have to switch and use a different frequency before it occurs.
I’m not using anything unusual and have been submitting Capture Data logs for the past few months, but the Tier 2 specialist I was working with apparently never submitted anything to engineering.
Ruling out that it’s not my Mac Studio computer, I’ve erased and reinstalled macOS and didn't import anything. It can even happen in Safe Mode when only using Safari.
When this issue occurs, the following things can be observed every time:
- Audio (and associated video) will not play (if I try to open Music or TV apps they’ll just perpetually bounce in the dock). Interestingly enough, video files with no audio track play perfectly fine.
- Streaming video sites (YouTube, Twitch, etc) will stop working. As a matter of fact, pages in Safari will just intermittently reload.
- Cannot switch audio out to another source (different speakers, Airpods, etc.)
- About this Mac, Restart, Shutdown, Volume and Brightness control are also unresponsive.
- If you try to screenshot (shift + command + 3), the sound effect and little preview on the bottom right hand corner will not occur.
As soon as you unplug the Studio Display from power or Thunderbolt 4, EVERY SINGLE sound that wasn’t working (notification pings, screenshot sound effect, etc.) will play in succession from the internal speaker of my Mac Studio computer. When the Display is plugged back in, everything I tried to open (About this Mac window, video files, etc) are now present like nothing happened.
After dealing with this issue for at least once a day for the past 3 months, there's no real way to gauge when it can occur but to me I think it's happened more often after waking up the Display or if I had something playing in the background (maybe paused) and the screensaver kicks in.
Unrelated to the audio issue, I've also noticed on more than one occasion that if I try to access Display settings under System Preferences that will just beachball and not load. And a few times when I went to System Report to find the Display's serial number, that and the Display Firmware Version information was not present. I had to unplug the Display and plug it back in for it to show.
Finally, I should note that as long as I set the audio output to something other than "Studio Display Speakers" I can use the Studio Display fine without issue.
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Looks a lot like the audio driver for the ASD in macOS dies and anything in the rest of the system which tries to output audio gets stuck or fails because of that.
System logs at that point in time when it fails would probably be most interesting. I would expect that any information you have given has in fact been forwarded to the technical teams, even if you haven't heard back from them yet.
You're sure that the firmware version of your ASD (to be seen in System Information) is really the current one (Display Firmware Version: Version 15.5 (Build 19F80))?
I've been running my music playback through my primary ASD for a few hours now and will continue to do so for a while just to see if something turns up. So far I find the sound quite enjoyable, even if it's not quite on the level of the big-box speakers I normally use, but still very nice and much better than most desktop speakers I've heard so far.
Yes, everything is up to date, Display Firmware Version is 15.5 (Build 19F80).
Apple support told me the previous specialist hadn’t submitted anything, so I assume they were waiting to see if this firmware would address the issue or not. I'm speaking with them again tomorrow.
They sound pretty good and one of the reasons I went for the ASD, so I wouldn't need external speakers. Little did I know what I was in for though.
Uh, why would I have to "prove" that? I've seen several people on here and various other places being stuck in restore mode like I have been.
Is this the proof you desire?
Studio Display Stuck in Endless Loop Whil… - Apple Community
Restore studio display - Apple Community
Well I dragged my ASD from my Ventura Mac Studio over to my wife's Mac Studio running Monterey and was able to update ASD firmware that I could not update on Ventura.
Did you figure out how to update your display? I updated to the newest Ventura beta and still not getting the display firmware update in Settings.