And what's with Dell's pricing on the 6K? I know there have been sales regularly, but in light of the release of multiple new 6K monitors with similar or even better specs but for much cheaper, the current regular pricing for the Dell 6K kinda seems ridiculous now, at US$2999.99 or CA$4219.99 (which is US$3011). In the very least it should now have a permanent discount off MSRP.
I don’t think that will happen unless Dell feels compelled to introduce a newer model.
Unfortunately for all of us, the demand for 32” 6K displays is fairly low. So the fact that we finally, after many years, have cheaper alternatives doesn’t mean Dell has any reason to lower the price on what I’m sure is a niche, low-volume item they sell to a specific customer who is much less price-conscious than the people who buy their other displays.
It’s sort of like how towards the end of the 2K/1440p iMac era (so like pre-2014 but maybe extending into 2015), we finally started to see competitors to the Apple Thunderbolt Display/LED Cinema Display — you could find them from other Chinese or Korean vendors for super cheap, and using the same panel Apple was using too. I know Apple never lowered the price on the ATD — they actually discontinued their own displays and let LG sell us UltraFines for 6 or 7 years instead — but my memory is Dell never lowered the price on their 27” 1440p monitors in that era either — not until gamers discovered 1440p
after Apple had Retina-pilled all of us and then removed subpixel anti-aliasing or whatever to make non-retina displays look WORSE on newer versions of macOS.
The same was true for 4K. It took gamers (and also TV makers) adopting 4K for us to see the prices go down. When I reviewed the trash can Mac Pro in January 2014, Apple sent me a Thunderbolt Display but to test the 4K support (which was new at the time), I had to call in a monitor from someone else and then struggle to find an adapter that would connect to the Mac Pro (which was a massive PITA as there were only a handful of 4K monitors available and finding a Thunderbolt 2 to DisplayPort adapter that supported whatever the spec was at the time for 4K, even in Midtown Manhattan, was far harder than it should’ve been). Within a few years, 4K displays were cheap and plentiful because gamers wanted them — but even after the LG 5K display came out in 2016, as this forum has chronicled, it has taken us until the last year to have sub-$1000 5K options that aren’t completely awful like the Samsung.
Given the requirements to power 6K at all — let alone at the high frame-rates gamers want (60hz was fine for 2014 — and if I’m remembering correctly, that 4K display I tested might’ve only worked at 30hz then, which was fine for video editing tests — but it might’ve been capable of 60hz and that was an adapter thing, I confess I don’t remember the details of that from almost 12 years ago) — I don’t have a lot of hope that the demand for 6K will explode.
Unfortunately, I do think that demand for 8K could go super high, even if they are limited to lower refresh rates for a while — but as discussed in other threads, that won’t do anything for macOS users unless Apple decides to fix fractional scaling. And that maybe only happens if they decide to make their own 8K Pro Display XDR.
So yeah, I’m not surprised Dell isn’t lowering the price on a monitor that they probably make extreme margin on at this point.
