DankPods bought a Studio Display, and it died after one update.

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

That is really depressing. Only used it about seven times and the monitor kept begging him to update, and when he finally updated it, it was now dead with no way to fix it.

 

[chrfr]

That is really depressing. Only used it about seven times and the monitor kept begging him to update, and when he finally updated it, it was now dead with no way to fix it.

This is why warranties exist. Sometimes things are defective.

 

[okkibs]

Sometimes things are defective.

This particular issue however is about how Apple engineers extra software complexity into a product that ends up failing due to software - and is at that point not even able to do its basic main task anymore, which is taking a signal and presenting it on the screen.

There might be nothing at all wrong with the hardware, it worked up until starting that update... so that entire thing has to be lugged to the seller or Apple for a repair (even if that is a software restore that takes mere seconds to complete) and who knows what that would cost after warranty expiration (I'll give Apple the benefit of doubt and assume a quick software revive would remain free in that case).

I'd argue that a device that is expected to receive software updates for advanced functionality like the camera and other extra features the Studio Display comes with should be designed in a way where those updates can't brick the entire thing. But now your monitor is its own computer that can have software errors, and fail like any other computer. And that seems like bad design to me.

Apple already ran into an update problem with the Studio Display shortly after the initial release when they published an update and then removed it from their servers on purpose before all the displays out there could grab it, and they broke the update function temporarily. They literally forgot about their own product, is the bottom line here. Surely you can see how that doesn't help to put users (or at least me) at ease about updating their monitor's firmware.

I get that Apple's products are generally of high quality and I am a fan of these myself - that includes the current monitor lineup. But there should have been a fallback mode so that the main functionality is always guaranteed. People keep their Apple devices and especially the monitors often for nearly a decade, sometimes longer. And if such an update fails years down the road, or even after all support has long run out... that warranty from back in the day won't help. They'll have perfectly fine hardware they can throw out just because that bad software design bricked it.