Just move around a bit and center stage does a good job at capturing the right amount of you. I found that it works quite well. And to update, go to settings and pick software update. It’s close to 500MB and takes a few minutes to install, the computer will reboot.
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Apple Studio Display - Owners Thread
- Thread starter KPOM
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Thanks. The 15.5 update made a big difference. In my case, it works better without Center Stage enabled. I no longer appear low in the frame.
Does anyone know if it was an intentional design decision for the Studio Display to leave all downstream ports fully powered up when no Mac is connected?
It's an odd one because when I plug in my Macbook Pro, it "power cycles" the downstream ports as part of the negotiation. I have a bunch of stuff plugged into a downstream USB hub including some LED mood lights behind the monitor and it's odd to see them left powered up when the display is effectively "off". It really should shut down the downstream ports when nothing is connected.
It's an odd one because when I plug in my Macbook Pro, it "power cycles" the downstream ports as part of the negotiation. I have a bunch of stuff plugged into a downstream USB hub including some LED mood lights behind the monitor and it's odd to see them left powered up when the display is effectively "off". It really should shut down the downstream ports when nothing is connected.
Why? It's a bonus if it can still charge another device even if no host is connected, isn't it?
Yep - That is what I use it for, charges my MBP and mouse when I am not using it.
Received my ASD’s last week but finally had time to build my desk and set them up. Amazing build quality.
anyone coming from a standard 4k 27" monitor? How much of a difference did it make? I remember looking at my friends 5k iMac when they first came out and it was breathtaking.
I actually quite like my dell P2715Q. I understand this isn't natural for Mac OS and there is some scaling issues going on behind the scenes but it hasn't made a lick of difference to my work. I also quite like the matte screen (which I guess I have to figure out if nano-texture is right for me).
There is a difference compared to my 14" mbp mini-led display but at the viewing distance I use my 27" monitor everything looks quite good.
Also, on a tangent anyone think that the ASD will see a normal product cycle just like the rest of apple products? It has a processor and I can see a natural transition in 1.5-2 years to mini-led panel, updated web cam but the chassis overall staying the same. Eventually a 24" 4.5k $999 option as well...
I actually quite like my dell P2715Q. I understand this isn't natural for Mac OS and there is some scaling issues going on behind the scenes but it hasn't made a lick of difference to my work. I also quite like the matte screen (which I guess I have to figure out if nano-texture is right for me).
There is a difference compared to my 14" mbp mini-led display but at the viewing distance I use my 27" monitor everything looks quite good.
Also, on a tangent anyone think that the ASD will see a normal product cycle just like the rest of apple products? It has a processor and I can see a natural transition in 1.5-2 years to mini-led panel, updated web cam but the chassis overall staying the same. Eventually a 24" 4.5k $999 option as well...
I sold my 5K iMac in October last year, when I got the 14". I used a pair of 4K HP Z27 up until the ASD arrived.
To me the resolution difference is clearly noticeable, even from about a meter away. However, the most significant quality-of-life improvement is the instant wake from sleep, and no fiddling around with the power button and menus every now and then to get the display to work.
Thinking back to the Thunderbolt Display days people would ask why I paid more for that panel and I would simply say I like changing the screen brightness via keyboard. I miss that so much. I’m going to check these out at the Apple store.
Update is out to address the speaker issues. Took about 5 mins for the update to apply.
Yup. Same here, both ASDs updated in parallel without a hitch, but some other users apparently had some hiccups on the way.
Maybe for the update it's best to check if you have the latest macOS and to have the ASD plugged directly into the Mac (without daisy chaining) and unplugging any USB devices from the ASD. Maybe that makes a difference there. Of course also having a good bit of space free on the system drive should help (several GB at least).
I don't know about the beta, but it is normal that updates don't appear exactly at the same time to all users because Apple is using CDNs to balance the load.
So it is quite possible that the update will show up to you as a beta tester at a slightly later time.
They may also deliberately hold it back for beta users until they have enough feedback from the first wave of installations through the regular version so they're confident that beta issues shouldn't make it any worse.
Just re-check again later.
There is software like MonitorControl to do that https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
Mines in the attic. Along with many other Apple boxes I kept ‘just in case’ - including the one from my long-gone 2009 17” Macbook Pro!Very important question
What to do with the box the ASD came with? Seems like a shame to toss it out as it so well designed.
I noticed the same when I got my ASD. I just assumed it was meant to be like that, and turned off True Tone.
But now you’ve mentioned it, I’ll keep checking it when firmware updates come out to see if its improved.
Same here. All apple product boxes in attic and useful able pack away to sell etc in future.
Question for dual Studio Display owners -
My two displays have shipped and are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday the 9th. What is the best way to connect them to my M1 Pro MBP? Connect both through a Thunderbolt 4 hub or connect each one to the MBP directly?
The reason I ask is that also connected to my Thunderbolt 4 hub is a 1G ethernet adapter, a Samsung T7 SSD, speakers (hub has a USB-to-3.5mm audio adapter), a Logitech mouse dongle and a wired keyboard.
My concern is that by running two displays off the same Thunderbolt channel that I'm going to run out of leftover bandwidth for decent performance of the rest of everything connected.
Somewhere in this thread was a post with all the math regarding each DSC 5K display stream and how much bandwidth each occupied, but I haven't quickly come back upon it within the 82 pages of this thread so far.
Anyway, running off one port is preferable of course, as long as I'm not reducing my ethernet and attached SSD speeds to USB 1.0-equivalent (or inducing significant display artifacts by compressing two 5K streams).
Anyone have any experience with this??
My two displays have shipped and are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday the 9th. What is the best way to connect them to my M1 Pro MBP? Connect both through a Thunderbolt 4 hub or connect each one to the MBP directly?
The reason I ask is that also connected to my Thunderbolt 4 hub is a 1G ethernet adapter, a Samsung T7 SSD, speakers (hub has a USB-to-3.5mm audio adapter), a Logitech mouse dongle and a wired keyboard.
My concern is that by running two displays off the same Thunderbolt channel that I'm going to run out of leftover bandwidth for decent performance of the rest of everything connected.
Somewhere in this thread was a post with all the math regarding each DSC 5K display stream and how much bandwidth each occupied, but I haven't quickly come back upon it within the 82 pages of this thread so far.
Anyway, running off one port is preferable of course, as long as I'm not reducing my ethernet and attached SSD speeds to USB 1.0-equivalent (or inducing significant display artifacts by compressing two 5K streams).
Anyone have any experience with this??
First and foremost: Don't connect both displays to the same Thunderbolt port!
Even if that should work nominally you'd degrade the image quality with that since each display needs more than half the 40Gb/s bandwidth of Thunderbolt already when run at full, uncompressed quality: 5120 * 2880 * 3colors * 10bit * 60Hz = 26.5Gb/s
So if you connected both to the same port they would be forced to switch to DSC compression, basically MP3 for displays, which can mean degraded visual quality in certain situations.
And then also adding a bandwidth-hungry SSD to that same port would really pile on the congestion and invite further issues (most likely not allowing the SSD to run at full speed and Ethernet possibly becoming flaky).
Ideally each display would be plugged into its own port and the Thunderbolt hub with the SSD and the rest of the devices into a separate third one. That would give you the maximum throughput for all devices.
The lower-bandwidth devices could be connected pretty much wherever practical and should work anywhere.
Each of the displays can still share the leftover 14Gb/s of its Thunderbolt connection with other devices, but you should check above all what the top speed of your SSD is to see if it would fit into that (so it and the other devices might not need a separate Thunderbolt port) or if it would be slowed down by sharing with a 5k display.
Thunderbolt is very fast, but 5k / 10bit at 60Hz is a lot of uncompressed display data to pump out, too.
Apple Silicon doesn't have the bandwidth limitation for pairs of Thunderbolt ports which Intel Macs still had, so that is not a factor any more.
How fast is your SSD? Ethernet should not be a big concern at 1Gb/s and the other devices even less, but the SSD might if it's a very fast one.
Yeah, that would happen if you put both displays on the same port. Probably not visible most of the time, but full, uncompressed quality at all times is only to be had if each display has its own Thunderbolt port and enough bandwidth for itself on that (it shouldn't care about the remaining 14Gb/s, though).
I'm using a Mac Studio with two 5k ASDs and another 4k display, each using their own ports and my Thunderbolt Dock plugged into the fourth. (The 4k could also go through the HDMI port, of course.)
But of course I acknowledge that for a MacBook the number of cables plugged into the machine is more relevant when connecting and disconnecting.
On the Mac Studio I just don't need to care about that.
Good information, thanks. The bandwidth discussion was what I was looking for.
SSD is ~800MB/sec (6.4Gb/s), so we're not talking ultrahigh performance here, but sounds like enough that it would likely use more than is left after two 5K DSC streams on the same TB channel.
I'm suspecting that if I plug each display in separately to my MacBook Pro, I probably won't need the Thunderbolt dock itself any more, since the three USB-C ports on the back of each display should be more than sufficient at that point (though would simplify cable management).
Any idea what each stream of 5K video gets compressed down to (under typical conditions) when using DSC compression?
Edit: quick Google search says DSC uses up to 3:1 compression. So if both get compressed 2:1 continuously, that still leaves up to 13.5 Gb/s of "space." Might not be that bad after all using both on one port. Most of what I do is text-based anyway with still images. I don't do any video editing. I guess I'll give it a try both ways and see if I detect any substantial issues with performance or visual artifacts. Even if the external SSD slows a bit, it'll be ok for my purposes.
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As I said, two 5k streams are just too much – they'll need to be compressed to fit even without any other devices already.
Yes, indeed; That should work. The ASD has USB3 ports in the back, so the SSD should run at its full speed there.
Since any USB hubs can have their own issues you could check if there is still a difference with the SSD plugged into your Thunderbolt hub or into the ASD – you could then daisy-chain the hub and the ASD on the same Thunderbolt bus if necessary, or just plug it into the ASD if that works as well.
The ASD provides up to 15W of power to connected devices (and of course up to 100W to a MacBook), so that should also be enough normally.
I've not looked into the details of that yet since I had no need for it.
Yeah, compression will affect high-resolution video more than most other content, so if the number of cables plugged into your Mac is your primary concern you can certainly just try and compare with all of your devices connected first one way and then the other, but it's a tight squeeze with all devices and you may experience reliability issues with some of them when Thunderbolt bandwidth is effectively overburdened.
One more detail to consider: If your MacBook is plugged into the hub it's the hub which will then have to supply all the charging power to it (unless you're using MagSafe in parallel). If the hub is limited in its charging power plugging an ASD in directly may be more useful because of its beefier power supply.
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My dock puts out 96 watts, so I'm good there (14" M1 Pro).
I'll probably end up plugging each display in separately, then connecting various other things to the ports on the back of the display to minimize what needs to get plugged in to & disconnected from the laptop each time I take with me, but I'll experiment when they arrive in a few days.
I have two ASDs plugged into a Caldigit Element dock, along with an SSD in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (for Time Machine backups), USB-A to ethernet adapter (mostly used for internet capped around 100mbps), wired keyboard, wired mouse, and a scanner. They all go to my M1 Pro MBP with the one provided Thunderbolt 4 cable and I've never seen any degradation in image quality or frame rate.
For reference, I primarily use the machine for development and can easily see the difference in text between these 5K displays and 4K (at 2560x1440 point) at the ~2.5 feet I sit from them. I play full screen videos on one display sometimes, but don't edit any high resolution video.
Before I got the dock, I connected the two ASDs to separate ports and used a USB-C dock for the rest, so I have compared the two setups and haven't seen any difference whatsoever (other than the easier daily docking/undocking that a single cable provides).
The only test I've run is a speed test on that Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and I believe the speeds were similar to what I was seeing with this drive with the three cable setup I used before (about 1500 MB/s read). I knew going in that even if it was slower, for Time Machine backups it probably wouldn't matter to me. I've gotta say, everything just seems to work for my use case.