Business Insider/Lisa Eadicicco
- Apple unveiled its new $5,000 Pro Display XDR alongside the new $6,000 Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
- The display is meant to be an alternative to high-end reference monitors that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
- It’s the first standalone display Apple has released in years, filling a hole in the company’s lineup.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference always marks a major moment for its Mac ecosystem, but the company surprised attendees on Monday by announcing an all-new Mac Pro for the first time since 2013.
The company is positioning the new Mac Pro, which starts at $6,000, as being a performance powerhouse for professional filmmakers, photo editors, and music producers. As such, the company also announced a new monitor to go with the Pro — the $5,000 Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch 6K screen with a resolution of 6,016 x 3,384.
Apple says it’s the biggest Retina display the company has ever built, and it designed the Pro Display XDR specifically to accommodate professionals that need to work with incredibly bright and highly crisp displays with super accurate color and contrast. With the Pro Display XDR, Apple is hoping to offer a monitor that outperforms reference monitors commonly used in film production that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but for a fraction of the price.
Whether or not it will succeed will largely depend how it’s received by the professionals that need it the most. That will rely on whether media editors feel it’s worth spending thousands more on the Pro Display XDR rather than going with other highly rated and less expensive options from competitors like Dell and LG.
Here’s a closer look at the Pro Display XDR.
The Pro Display XDR is meant to compete with expensive reference monitors used for film editing and music scoring, not your average computer monitor.
Business Insider/Lisa Eadicicco
As such, the Pro Display XDR supports custom reference modes for elements like color and gamma, among others, and it was built with super-wide viewing angles using a polarizer technology. This should make Apple’s new display look 25% better than rivals when viewing the screen off-axis.
It also has a million-to-one contrast ratio, which is significantly higher than that of Dell’s 32-inch 8K monitor. That display, which now costs $3,900 but was originally priced at $5,000 like Apple’s new monitor, only offers a 1,300-to-one contrast ratio.
Apple’s new monitor is made using LCD technology, not OLED. While OLED is traditionally considered better for contrast, LCD is brighter, which is crucial for offering high-quality HDR, one of the Pro Display XDR’s most important features.
Apple
The Pro Display XDR can sustain 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness indefinitely and 1,600 nits of peak brightness.
The display is comprised of seven different layers, which helps it achieve high brightness and color accuracy among other factors.
Business Insider/Lisa Eadicicco
These layers include a color correction sheet, an optics sheet, and a diffuser plate that directs light into a cavity reflector to better shape the light outward. That color correction sheet is necessary because Apple’s display uses blue LEDs rather than white LEDs like most monitors. Apple opted for blue LEDs because they’re easier to control.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Yes, Apple just killed iTunes — here’s what that means for your library of music, movies, and TV shows
- Apple wants to sell you a $1,000 stand so you can use its new $5,000 monitor
- Apple ends a 6-year drought for the Mac Pro with a wildly powerful, redesigned new model that starts at $5,999
SEE ALSO: Here’s everything Apple just announced at WWDC, its biggest event of the year
Source: Business Insider – leadicicco@businessinsider.com (Lisa Eadicicco)