Apple Studio Display 5K

I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine) I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet. I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors. Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use. Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.

I built a beast of a workstation in '23 and it's had like 5 collective minutes of downtime since. Debian 12, KDE, 13900K, 128GB ram, 2x2TB nvme disks for my home dir in a btrfs mirror, a 4TB /var disk for containers, psql, etc. It's such a stable and consistent workhorse. Slack, Spotify, vscode, sublime, 1password, screen sharing, google meet, everything works great. Using Libreoffice/Onlyoffice in lieu of MS stack has not been an issue, even when doing extensive document comment reviews with financial companies etc who live on Microsoft tooling. The irony is that I am using this with a 5K Apple Studio Display, lol. The webcam and other onboard goodies do not work (can't control brightness) but the picture quality sure is good. The Linux desktop is 100% here.

I have one desk setup where the main monitor is a 5k Studio Display (with 27” 1440 secondary), and another where that Dell is the main monitor. While the former is much nicer looking, I don’t find the 27” 1440s bad at all under macOS. My mail client and RSS reader even sits on the secondary 1440 most of the time, so it’s used for reading plenty. I don’t futz with AA settings at all. Laptops in general haven’t been flush with ports for a very long time now, unless we’re talking about workstation laptops and sometimes gaming laptops. I have an old late-00s 15.4” Precision that has more ports than a lot of consumer desktops and entry-level motherboards these days, but by and large laptops come with maybe a third as many at most. Apple laptops haven’t been replete with ports like that since the PowerBook G3 “Pismo” was EoL’d back in 2000. People who need that many ports usually get a tower of some kind.

I can't really agree with this at all. I am a very design-heavy person who has been using a Mac professionally since the x86 transition, and have very strong opinions about font rendering, color accuracy, etc. About 2 years ago, I built a beast of a Linux workstation and use it with a 5K Apple Studio Display. Everything looks flawless and pixel perfect.

Under $100 Aeropress - quick coffee with easy cleanup. Waterproof and nonslip cat blanket to go over the couch. Surprisingly comfy. So far saved more spillage from humans than the cats. Under $1000 Replaced all my Audio RaspberyPis with WiiM devices. They are like $150 - $400. A bit over $1000 Apple 5K studio display. Can't begin to desribe the difference on my eyes compared to a regular 27" with 1/4 the number of pixels. Bonus category, things that were shit: Hand massager. Device you put your hand in and, in theory, it massages it. It tried to bend my finger joints back by pressing down in the middle.

I have a MacBook Air on my desk plugged into a Apple 27-inch 5k Studio Display next to my work MacBook Pro plugged into a cheap AOC 27-inch 4k display via HDMI and frankly there's not much difference. The speakers and mic in the Apple display are nice, but if you're just concerned about the display itself save yourself the bucks and stay with the 4k.