To coincide with the company’s new Mac Pro, Apple today announced its new Pro Display XDR. Starting at a staggering $4,999, the display comes with basically everything professions need in order to get work done with color accuracy, plenty of pixels and more.
The Pro Display XDR boasts a 32-inch LCD panel that’s been way over-engineered. Apple packs in a 6016×3384 resolution along with P3 and 10-bit color reference modes for the most accurate representation of what’s on-screen. The display offers extremely-wide viewing angles, an anti-reflective coating, and an optional matte coating called nano-texture, “with glass etched at the nanometer level for low reflectivity and less glare.”
Because Apple used an LCD, there’s no way to directly turn off pixels you aren’t using for true blacks. But like the anti-reflective coating options, Apple over-engineered the LCD as well to support true blacks. The company uses a giant array of LED lights in the back that can produce 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness indefinitely, with a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. It’s these LEDs that can be controlled to focus on the content at hand. So if you have something like the flower we see on Apple’s demo GIF, light will blast at the content, while the staggering 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio helps to keep the black background black. XDR (or extreme dynamic range) also helps to achieve this.
The design of the monitor is what you’d expect, at least on the front. It sports 9mm bezels around the display with a typical metal stand. Turning the display around, though, and you’ll find a similar cheese grater-style design to the new Mac Pro. This design choice was made so it can work as a heat sink since the LEDs in the screen will definitely be working up a sweat.
I mentioned the “typical metal stand” before, but I feel like I didn’t actually do it justice. There are a ton of different ways to adjust the Pro Display XDR on the stand. Heck, you can even turn the whole screen sideways for a portrait viewing experience. But here’s the thing: the stand doesn’t come with the monitor. That’s a separate $999 purchase you have to make. So if you actually want to use the screen like a normal human being, you have to spend $6,000.
It’s one of the most insane things I’ve ever heard. Yet, I don’t expect anything less from Apple.
Rounding things off, the Pro Display XDR comes with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity so you can connect up to two displays to a MacBook Pro or up to six displays on the Mac Pro.
Apple will begin selling the $4,999 Pro Display XDR and the $999 stand this fall.
