Apple's $5K Pro Display XDR is a good deal for the right person

Yes, the apple pro display XDR is $5,000 at least ,it's time to get over that already because for professionals who would be using it, that's actually not a bad deal for what you're getting. And frankly professionals are used to paying money for their gear. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] I now waiting months and months and months for the apple pro display XDR to fall into my waiting hands. And it finally did a few days ago. And what happened? My colleague started trotting through the lapse to look at it. One group came in and just wanted to pet it because it's so pretty. I didn't care if I turned it on. The next group looked at it and said, That's awfully thick. I didn't realize it was that thick. And the last person just one person came in plopped himself in my chair and said, Let's see some HDR footage. And that in a nutshell is the genius of Apple's marketing. Because the buzz this monitor has generated far outstrips the market that it's actually designed for. [MUSIC] And who are these people? Well, they are Mac based video editors working on very bright and by bright, I mean over a thousand it's high dynamic range. And who can't afford the type of monitor that you need to really provide reference for high dynamic range shooting. It's also for photographers working in the P3 color space on a Mac who wants the grayscale tones that you can really see well on this monitor It's also for illustrators working on very detailed drawing who need the high resolution of the 6K monitor. And I should say that any video that you see on the actual screen is non-representative of what it actually looks like. Because by the time this video's compressed, [SOUND] all bets are off. As I said, I've only had it for a few days, and I've just begun my actual testing. And I'm still trying to work out some of the kinks, and yes, there are some frustration kinks and drawbacks. But some things jumped out of me the minute I set it up. The first were the cables, I love the cables, they're so nicely constructed, they're better than a gaming accessory cable. And then it's quiet. Really, that's because the entire back that's so eye catching is also a big heat sink. It is designed to dissipate the heat from the backlight which as you might expect can get really hot. The only fans in there are to blow across the circuit board which generates a little but not most. And also I have worked with thousand net monitors and they generate a lot of heat out of the front. This one very cool as as the air that gets blown out the back. [MUSIC] And then there's the color. Actually the blacks, just by eyeballing the blacks are some of the nicest ones that I've seen on the desk. Top monitor, they're really dark and that includes [UNKNOWN] which actually gets zero black, but this has total range in the shadows which is something I miss on [UNKNOWN]. And then there's skin tones. Until you pop some portraits up on the pro display, you don't realize how imprecise the monitors that you may have been counting one are And that includes the iMac screen, we have the $5,000 based version of the monitor, it doesn't include the $1000 upgrade with the nano texture glass. That glass is designed to significantly decrease the reflectivity, among other things. It's really not that bad in practice, only when you're staring at a solid black screen, which you probably aren't, and it gets pretty fingerprinty And I'm a monitor toucher and some people have noticed you will see some haloing of bright highlights on super dark backgrounds. That's a fact of life with LED based HDR. The mini LED is or how they managed to get it so bright. Yes, that's not something that says comment on the lead. It's all about trade offs. [MUSIC] Driving the high six K resolution and the 10 BIT bit depth requires a lot more bandwidth than display 1.4 can handle. That's the version of display port that drives monitors when you use Thunderbolt three. So Mac OS does a little bit of Voodoo that increases the bandwidth to drive monitors from Thunderbolt three That's why it's not compatible with some older Macs because they use older Thunderbolt controllers, and that includes the iMac Pro. So to use it with that you have to get the Blackmagic Design external GPU, but that's nothing new. pushing the envelope on monitor specifications is always required a little alchemy on the part of operating systems. That's why they wait for a system chipsets to catch up with them. The monitors controlled strictly by the operating system there are no hardware controls and I miss them. Even something as simple as a power button because yes, I occasionally like to turn them off. I also miss having inputs aside from the one [UNKNOWN] That's because I like to hook it up to multiple machines, and switch among them. That, you can't do. Plus, two important features are still on the operating system road map, and those are custom calibrations and user reference modes. Because frankly, we don't know much about the characteristics of the monitor, and how much the color and the LED backlight are gonna drift over time. Do you need to recalibrate it in six months? Do you need to recalibrate it in a year? Do you need to ever recalibrate it? That's something that Apple thinks you don't have to do but who knows. And as a PSA, the only way to run it with Windows is under boot camp. I have tried plugging it in it to a Windows 10 laptop, And it was not pretty, but I'm still working on that. [MUSIC] And then there's the stand, the thousand dollar stand that everybody's talking about. And yes, it glides when you rotate the display, but if you want something that feels good gliding by a fidget spinner, is it worth it? I don't really think so, you can't swivel it, and you can't align it perfectly with the iMac. You can't lock it, level it. It's always a little off line. So to sum up my feelings thus far, the monitor is overkill for a lot of people Underkill for a group of people, and just right for a relatively small group of people. [MUSIC]