Personal nerd and poor financial decision milestones were achieved today: I got a VESA-mountable Apple Studio Display to pair with my M2 Pro Mac mini. This is my first-ever Apple desktop display of my own. It’s been just a few hours, and I haven’t had much time with it, but so far, so good. I’m coming from a 27" 4K LG monitor that I was upscaling to 5K to get more breathing room in the UI, and there’s definitely an improvement not only in text sharpness, but even in system graphics performance now that the GPU doesn’t have to upconvert every UI frame.

Interestingly, with the Studio Display supporting True Tone, I thought for sure that it would go into a color temperature mismatch with my secondary 24" LG 4K display. That’s not the case, though: the True Tone support on the Studio Display also extends out to the monitor that doesn’t support it. That’s pretty nifty, IMO.

I’ve not really used the webcam yet (though my tests show that the firmware updates seem to have helped at least in my environment). The speakers are excellent, though, and I’m looking forward to trying the microphone on calls.

Having the three USB 3.1 ports available is quite nice, with plenty of bandwidth to go around. I have both of my FaceCams (one a FaceCam Pro, another a FaceCam Mk. 2) plugged into the monitor now, and I’m getting hitch-free uncompressed video from both. In the previous configuration, the hub on the LG monitor only supported USB2 speeds because I was using DisplayPort-over-USB, so I got MJPEG compression from the Mk. 2. The Pro was plugged directly into the Mac. The other bright side here is that I was able to free up a Thunderbolt 4 port directly on the Mac.

If there’s one caveat, I think it’s the panel’s response time – feels like my LG was a little quicker in this department. But it’s not a dealbreaker as I really don’t do any hardcore gaming on this machine. I leave that to the iMac G3 in the kitchen. :)

There’s a bad bug in the latest Keynote update for iPadOS (and probably iOS, too). If, on first launch, you open a presentation with font warnings, after dismissing the font warning box you’ll be presented with a totally unresponsive Keynote. You have to open a presentation with no font warnings (or start a new one) in order to get Keynote to get going, which I accomplished through the Haptic Touch context menu. Once that’s done, you are prompted with the “what’s new in Keynote” modal…which likely was the culprit for the whole thing. Ugh.

I think I am finally becoming a real Mac user: both my home and work desktops have gotten uncharacteristically cluttered with lots of random things. (Thank goodness for Stacks.)

I upgraded my Mac mini’s monitor yesterday. I ended up going with a 27” LG 4K IPS panel.

First impressions are good. I’m hooked to the Mini via DisplayPort over USB-C. The USB-A ports are super-handy (and really a nice bonus), but are notably not rigged for high-power applications such as a charging pad.

Picture quality is great and does the job well for me. Text looks great, which is what I was gunning for, and the viewing angles are exactly what you would expect from an IPS panel. Looking forward to putting it more through its paces this week.