I see where you said that, it was just oddly tacked on to the end of the sentence, my bad. Wouldn’t/couldn’t there also be an issue with sustained performance on 6K@120Hz even with Boost? I suppose that is where adaptive rates would save Apple’s bacon unless a user was trying to game or do some other task requiring consistently high frame rates. It kind of seems like the challenge for Apple here is too either eat it on the margins (yeah right) or push this thing past the $2K mark on a base config.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but boost doesn't necessarily have to be some temporary thing, since what it does is change the 2+2 lane bidirectional configuration (80 Gbps each way) to 3+1 lanes (120 Gbps downstream and 40 Gbps upstream).
On that monitor they could just make it permanent, and it would still function as a Thunderbolt hub, but at Thunderbolt 4 speed, not Thunderbolt 5.
Still holding out for a Pro Display XDR refresh. With the cheap 32” panels that are out I’m hoping it gets a significant price drop too, but lol Apple.
The high cost isn't just due to the panel, but everything else, including backlight, chassis, and QA (see below).
You can actually buy a 6K 6144x3456 monitor with solid aluminum chassis and solid aluminum height-adjustable stand right now with LG panel for about US$700 shipped.
Despite the XDR's excellent panel QA though, one red flag with the XDR is the failure rate over time. There have been numerous reports of monitor hardware failure at around the 3-4 year mark, even if the panel itself is still working fine.
Studio Display 1 is a mediocre monitor (with decent build quality). It's been an uncompetitive product since day one. Apple rarely misses the mark, but this one was just bad.
SD2 with those specs sounds like a day one purchase and finally a good monitor from Apple for the first time in 15+ years.
I agree ASD 1 was mediocre specs wise, but in terms of implementation, it has been excellent. It has amongst the best colour calibration out of the box, and has a much lower incidence of issues such as backlight bleed and significant dirty screen effect. Obviously the ASD is not perfect, but panel lottery is a much more common problem with monitors from companies like LG and others.
You'd be surprised how few monitors come with the niceties of the Apple displays! I don't know of any that have a webcam, decent speakers, and auto-brightness built-in. And boy have I looked.
Thankfully I have a monitor solution that works well, but I can easily see the allure of using Apple's solution.
Maybe, but still, getting all of that to work on Linux is even harder than just trying to get the monitor to display something under Linux. So that just makes the Linux compatibility issue even worse.
BTW, as of 2025, decent third party webcams are actually affordable. I personally use an
Insta360 Link 2C.
