Did you see what I did there? No? That’ll be because it’s too damn glossy. Zing!
OK, I bought a monitor last year. My old 23″ Apple display was getting to the is-this-even-switched-on stage of backlight dimming, which after 16 years is probably fair enough. Apple’s current 27″ 5K Studio display is doubtless great and all, but even with academic discount that thing is like £1,350, and academics aren’t paid what they used to be. Or rather, they are paid exactly what they used to be, but a decade of inflation has bitten rather hard. Boo hoo.
Oh, and: a single USB-C cable, Apple? Thanks, that’s great and all, but I’d like to be able to switch between my MacBook and Windows box. I know, that’s confusing for you. But I want to play Veilguard.
OK, so… what else? HP? Dell? Samsung?
Meh, I bought the 27″ Alogic Clarity. It’s… well look, it’s good. There are lots of reviews which will tell you it’s good. Which contrasts with HP and Dell where a few reviews will tell you that last year’s model used to be good, but you can’t buy that any more and as for this year’s model? Heck, who knows? Or Samsung, where the models two years ago were OK but they have these new fancy ones announced at CES and maybe they’ll be available before the next CES? Maybe not? Do they actually sell stuff, or just announce it, I honestly don’t know.
Would I buy another Alogic? Mmmmmm… you know, I don’t think I would. Here’s why:
Things I like
- The stand. Properly excellent!
- Picture quality. It’s great!
- Variety of inputs. Hurray!
- Autoswitching inputs. Mostly works!
- Does whatever it is that allows a Mac to recognise a monitor and restore a previous window setup. I genuinely thought this had been removed from Mac OS because I haven’t seen it for years, but it turns out: HP monitors don’t do it, and this thing does. It’s such a nice quality-of-life feature, particularly for those of us who typically have a couple of dozen applications open at once. And yes, I really do. Today is a focussed work day for me, and I’m already at 16 apps. Seriously, this is great, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about Macs have done this since the 68k era, FFS. It’s just what computers do. Except – apparently – any computer you’ve ever used, you peasant.
- I was expecting to have more angst about 4K vs 5K (I have a 5K iMac on my desk at the university). In practice… meh, 4K is fine at 27″. I don’t notice text being softer, and sure, the 5K display is a joy, but this is great to work at too.
- Power delivery, single-cable connection. I don’t acutally use this as I have a USB-C (Thunderbolt? I… actually don’t know) hub on my desk. But I wouldn’t consider buying a monitor that didn’t deliver at least 65W over USB-C. Convenience is great.
Things I don’t like
- Glossy. Glossier than I expected.
- Not as bright as I expected. It seems less bright than my 13″ M1 MacBook Pro, which is rated at (I think) 500 nits.
- Dialling in colour settings has been a faff, and I’ve mostly given up. The default is a bit too contrasty for me, but if I tone it down everything gets dimmer. Maybe I’m in the wrong colour space? There’s not much guidance.
- Is it on? The power light is blue (standby) or white (on), but it points downwards. It’s genuinely hard to tell if it’s on. This matters because:
- Is it powering up? It doesn’t auto-wake when it receives a signal. I think it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t. Often the first indication I get that it’s coming up is when windows disappear from the MacBook display. But it does seem odd that after years of waiting slightly-too-long for computers to come out of sleep, I’m now waiting for my monitor to boot. Progress!
- Oh, it didn’t power up. Sometimes the blue light won’t turn white at all. Then you have to grope behind the panel, unplug the power brick, and plug it back in again. Sigh. It’s 2025, come on.
- Does it have loudspeakers? Huh, turns out it does. I turned them off within minutes because… er… they hiss. WTF? The sound quality is… ugh, I’ve no idea. What’s with that noise floor, and why would I accept it? Sheesh. Oh, also they sound crap anyway.
- The on screen display. Oh. Oh my. Oh dear.
Let’s talk about the OSD. It has those tricky-to-find, which-one-am-I-prodding buttons curled around the bottom right corner. One of which does… something. Another does something else. Yet another turns the monitor off, which is definitely not the one you want. A little key pops up when you press a button which is almost aligned with where the buttons are, but sometimes the middle two (which are offset to the left) do left and right, and sometimes they do down and up, and sometimes they select a thing or not. Or something.
Yeah. It’s like every OSD you’ve ever used. It’s terrible. You hate using it. Your heart breaks a little every time you’re forced to reach for those damned buttons, like when you turned the audio on while writing this because you’d forgotten both that it existed and that it made that damnable hisssss sound, and now you desperately need to turn it off again but oh shit, that means wrestling with the buttons.
In principle the buttons can be used to select the active input, but in practice it’s always easier to straight-up unplug the monitor’s USB-C cable from my desktop hub and rely on the autoswitching. That’s rubbish.
So you start to wonder: why do none of the reviews talk about this? Ooooh, because the controls are only as bad as every other monitor out there, so we’ve got used to them. On every monitor. Ever.
Except Apple’s. And that’s £1350. Ho ho ho how laughably ridiculous.
It’s the same as every laptop review running performance tests, but failing to mention that performance tanks as soon as you unplug the laptop. Because they all do that. Except Macs, which don’t slow down on battery. But look at the price, sheesh.
The bottom line
Many of my negatives here are in the realm of ‘niggling annoyances.’ Do I regret not spending double (or so) to buy the Apple display? No, I do not. But I do sort-of regret not spending rather less to buy, say, a Dell. Because I think it’d annoy me only about as much.
The thing is, I only know that now. If I’d bought the Dell, I’d seriously regret not having bought the Alogic. But now I’m more confident that monitors plain suck, and there’s a reason Apple charge so much for theirs: it’s good, and it just works. One of the reasons Apple does so well at the mid-to-high end of the computer market is that there really isn’t much competition up there.
Is the Alogic Clarity a good monitor? Sure. It probably has a slightly better picture than that of cheaper panels. Colour seems fairly neutral, it’s just the contast and brightness that are a bit odd. But it’s not so good that I really trust it, and if I need to trust my display’s colour (as I sometimes do), that’s a problem. And then I’d buy Apple. Or, you know, something similarly-priced from Eizo or ViewSonic or whoever’s good these days. So I can’t shake off a bit of disappointment, because I don’t think it’s the just-as-good-for-half-the-price bargain I’d hoped.
There are no pictures or links in this post because if there were, it would still be in draft. There’s this thing called Google, you’ll work it out.