Studio Display

When Apple announced the new Studio Display at their March Event, I wanted one. Tammy didn’t mind, so I ordered one later that evening. The shipping delay had already pushed out a week at that point, so it arrived yesterday, a little over a week after they were released. It’s in the spirit of the Thunderbolt Display that I bought in 2014: a very nice 27″ monitor that has speakers, a webcam and good connectivity. I’ve been using the LG 24″ Ultra Fine display since early in the pandemic, and it’s been just great but now Tammy will inherit it.

I don’t know how much I will be working at home vs. working at the office later this year. Esri Canada has finally set a date for the Calgary office reopening: May 16th. However, the company has been very successful with work from home over the past two years and has grown. There are now more people “in the Calgary office” than can fit in the Calgary office, despite the renos that happened. My boss Kjetil is in Ottawa, and in our conversations he is definitely not pressuring me to be in the office at all. In fact, I am on video calls so much every day that I don’t see it being possible to do my job in a cubicle without annoying the heck out of my co-workers. The fact that I’ve “perfected” my home office in the last two years is certainly going to weigh in the decision. I like the routine of going to the office, but I don’t think it will be the same as pre-pandemic.

With that out of the way… here’s the monitor, arriving in its UPS box.

I wanted to set it up next to the Thunderbolt Display (which is still in daily use attached to the Mac mini) to see how they compare. The first thing you notice is the smaller size. Smaller bezels and a thinner enclosure make the Studio Display much smaller side-by-side.

Two other major differences are

• Reflectivity: the new one has an antireflective coating
• Resolution: the new one has 4x the number of pixels

Murphy was very impressed with the quality of the new monitor.

The monitor is now set up and ready for my first day of work with it. I had my board games night last night, and I could see a lot more of the board game with the bigger monitor. My biggest concern is over the Center Stage feature of the webcam. It follows you around like a virtual cameraman. When Tammy and I tested it in Microsoft Teams, the effect wasn’t that intrusive, but during games night, I caught my “selfie image” moving around quite a bit in WebEx. I can disable it, but I would prefer not to.