5K, 6K or 8K: new Asus ProArt monitors

[tenthousandthings]

In terms of desktop displays, do you anticipate that OLED will displace IPS to the extent IPS dominates today, or do you think both will persist well into the future, with OLED just having a larger share than it does now?

The big problem with IPS appears to be the high costs associated with locally-dimmed backlights and timing controllers.

I don't know, but I think OLED is the future. I mean, LG Display sold its IPS television business. They are all-in with OLED when it comes to televisions. Samsung Display too, more or less.

LG Display (Korea) is still making IPS panels for computers, obviously, but are they going to invest in solving the cost problem of large mini-LED arrays? Seems doubtful. So that leaves AUO (Taiwan) and BOE (China) to push IPS forward. BOE did a prototype of a dual-mode 32" 8K/4K 120Hz/240Hz, but as far as we know it was edge-lit.

 

[drrich2]

I don't know, but I think OLED is the future. I mean, LG Display sold its IPS television business. They are all-in with OLED when it comes to televisions. Samsung Display too, more or less.

Interesting. The big majority of t.v.s are used in much the same way by most people; watching video at a distance and for a subset gaming. The high contrast, vivid color and high refresh rates associated with OLED are a good match for the use cases there.

With computer displays, there's more variation. In another thread, a fellow poster I've come to respect passed along something to the effect he'd heard OLED didn't offer as sharp a text clarity (yet) as IPS (I'm talking about same resolution/size/PPI, but the lack of 5K 27" OLED), and he was waiting some comparisons to find out more.

So my questions would be these:

1.) Is OLED equally good at displaying sharp text? Anybody here done a 'side-by-side' comparison between, say, text on IPS and OLED 4K 27" displays?

2.) Does OLED offer any benefit for general 'office work' type activities? I get that it's not going to improve Word's spell checking or make Chrome render webpages faster, but in terms of resolution, 'pretty,' joy to use, etc., are users much happier with it?

3.) For now OLED seems to command a premium; do you anticipate it will achieve price parity with IPS? If not, seems like a lot of corporate buyers and budget home users will keep IPS alive.

4.) Putting aside the issue of burn in (which I take it has been improved, mitigation strategies employed, is less an issue than it used to be and hopefully with ongoing improvements is a diminishing concern?), anybody know roughly how the lifespan of an OLED display compares to a similar IPS display?

5.) Is there any known technical issue explaining why we don't see 5 or 6K mainstream OLED displays on offer, or is it just a matter of what vendors perceive market demand to be?

 

[bigglow]

The big problem with IPS appears to be the high costs associated with locally-dimmed backlights and timing controllers.

I don't know, but I think OLED is the future. I mean, LG Display sold its IPS television business. They are all-in with OLED when it comes to televisions. Samsung Display too, more or less.

LG Display (Korea) is still making IPS panels for computers, obviously, but are they going to invest in solving the cost problem of large mini-LED arrays? Seems doubtful. So that leaves AUO (Taiwan) and BOE (China) to push IPS forward. BOE did a prototype of a dual-mode 32" 8K/4K 120Hz/240Hz, but as far as we know it was edge-lit.

What I <3 about this is that R&D money from smartphones trickles down to larger devices like tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, theater screens and stadium screens.

So by the time I replace my 2019 MBP 16" I'd get an perfected screen in 2029.

 

[filmgirl]

What I am saying here is how can Apple justify the $500 difference between 24" vs 27" at the same 218 ppi? One was released 2021 vs the other in 2014?

I think this makes an assumption that Apple has to justify it at all and I’m arguing they don’t and they wouldn’t. And yes, I do think 2021 vs 2014 would be just as good of a reason as anything.

Look, until 13 months ago, Apple sold brand-new $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM of non-upgradable RAM, the same way they had been selling $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM of non-upgradable RAM since 2012. And people on this website still defended them and I even saw people argue that really, with inflation, we were all getting our base amounts of RAM and storage for just amazing prices.

At what price point though? Will Apple support it at today's 6K standard of support? Does today's macOS on M4 model Macs support 8K displays better than today's Win11 on the latest 5nm x86 chips & 5nm Nvidia GPUs?

I’m not Nostradamus but I imagine in 5 years, 8K will be the equivalent of what 4K was 6- 7 years ago (so attainable, on the cusp of being a standard). That’s how progress works. This will all be driven by content (as it always is) so if there aren’t a lot of 8K video, and 8K TVs and 8K upscaled games, we won’t see the displays. It will come to TVs first (after tablets and phones as another poster said), and TV makers love 8K because it’s a way to convince people they really need an 80” screen in their house you can see skin cells on or something.

4K TVs got very cheap, very quickly and then that proliferated down to monitors — so that’s what I’m watching here. How long before 8K TVs become attainable and then it will shift into other displays.

But like @tenthousandthings, I also expect almost all our displays to be OLED or even whatever comes after OLED. And if anything a move to OLED will just in increase how quickly we go from TVs to monitors, because they’ll be able to use some of the same materials, as opposed to still segmenting into IPS.

I definitely don’t think current macOS supports 8K — assuming you could get access to a reference monitor or a TV — as well as Windows/Nvidia do, but in theory the M4 supports

The Acer PE0 ("ProCreator") series 5K and 6K press release was May 2025. But the 31.5" 4K 240Hz was announced at CES 2025. You're probably thinking of the ASUS ProArt, where the 5K was available a year ahead of the 6K and 8K.

I really thought I was thinking of some display that was directly targeted at Mac users, and I could’ve sworn it was Acer, but it may have actually been one of their creator laptops. No idea!

Interesting. I had a 2017 27" iMac, and recall when the gap between MacMini updates was so long a number of people speculated Apple had written it off, so I suspect the iMac was the leader seller amongst Macs by a large margin, and most of those were 27" if you are correct (and I've no reason to doubt that).

So, if even the lead seller amongst Macs didn't sell 'enough,' I have to wonder what that means for how Apple chooses to manage the Mac line.

Yeah, Apple always led me to believe the 27” was the one iMac they sold in real volume. Lots to schools, to offices, to families. But as @tenthousandthings eloquently said, I don’t think that Apple quite anticipated some of its use cases (a lot of creatives who or prosumers who used it as a great monitor and a very good, if not Mac Pro level, computer) and when it did do an iMac Pro, I think it gave us the worst of everything. Perhaps it is unfair and irrational, but I blame the failure of the iMac Pro (which was really just a very late reaction to the failure of the 2013 Mac Pro) on why Apple just exited the segment, and just did a redesign of the kitchen computer. Or maybe the plan was to try to make the ASD the new 27” iMac but they couldn’t get the thermals or whatever to work. Who knows.

But the Mac mini as you note, is the interesting anomaly across the desktop history. As you said, they’d go through eras of just never updating it ever — and then eras of it being a great value. Heck, before the 27” iMac came out I remember people pairing Mac minis with various Apple Cinema Displays. The late-2009 iMac was my college graduation gift to myself, so I could never afford that matchup earlier, but I recall people doing that.

I wonder if the secret was the datacenter. Even pre-Apple Silicon, the company I work for quite literally has custom server racks for all the minis we use to serve some of our custom compute products in our data centers — thousands of them — and I’m sure we’re not even close to the cloud company that has the most minis. And that only accelerated post Apple silicon, where the mini was an even stronger compute performer (and Apple cracked down even more on licensing usage). The current Mac mini is so small and so powerful relative to its price, honestly, I absolutely believe it would be more popular than an updated iMac — but that definitely didn’t seem that way in 2021 when the iMac redesign happened.

But maybe it was that simple: “we can sell tens of thousands of minis to data centers and we won’t ever sell the displays in that volume.” And for all my complaints about the death of the iMac for me, at least Apple did give us a very good prosumer/professional desktop in the Mac Studio. I was always a Mac Pro admirer, but Apple kept doubling the price as soon as it became something I could reasonably budget for, and when faced with spending my annual computing budget on one Mac Pro, or on a iMac and a phone and a tablet, or a laptop and a phone and a tablet, I chose what I chose.

Although I keep buying laptops, the Mac Studio is sort of my perfect desktop. And now that I have two 6K displays, I might more seriously consider getting one for personal stuff, alongside a MacBook Air, instead of my current cycle of just spending way too much on a 14” laptop that I often use as a desktop anyway.

Apple sort of lucked into the value, as it were, of using Mac minis and Studios for AI inference, and so I expect they are probably selling for more desktops today than in the 2010s.

Also, I totally agree with you on the surprise we haven’t seen a more aesthetic Mac mini mounts for the ASD or really any monitor.

I had two Retina iMacs, a 2015 and a 2017. I replaced a perfectly good machine to get an improved panel in 2017. I think, also in 2017, Apple admitted the 27" iMac was being used in ways that they hadn't anticipated. They didn't understand. The iMac Pro really illustrated that, I think. Like you, I spent ~$4,000 (including the cost of high-quality, third-party RAM) each time, so the base iMac Pro at $5,000 wasn't wildly out of reach, but I didn't see the point.

Yeah! I was in a similar scenario — I did buy the 2017 iMac in June or July of 2017 — and I probably would’ve done a base model iMac Pro had it been available at the same time, but as it was, I really didn’t need the power of that iMac Pro. And 3 years later, as I was debating my final Intel Mac, I was looking at the Mac Pro (2019) and a fully specced out iMac and honestly, what I did was to buy the iMac AND then I built a high-end gaming PC that I could also use for Docker and the then-burgeoning AI stuff, and that made more sense. Use the iMac as an iMac (and a great one), use the PC for games and some coding and streaming stuff. Plus it was 2020, and building computers was one of the only things keeping me sane.

Back to the display convo — with the disclosure that I just got two $2000 monitors for free (that I haven’t been able to setup because I injured my neck and I need to wait for a part from Ergotron for my desk) — my plan pre-contest was to order a Kuycon or LG and see how it goes. That said, for value, I think it looks like the Acer in 5K and 6K, might not be the “nicest” monitors in terms of fit snd finish, but the price is extremely, extremely compelling.

 

[EugW]

I'm not convinced 8K will be even close to mainstream for desktop computers in 5-6 years. There is no real mass market need for 8K at 32" (since that's 275 ppi - Retina at 12.5"), and most will not be buying 40" screens for 8K either (which is 220 ppi - Retina at 15.6").

A far, far, far more interesting target would be 5K-6K 120 Hz OLED (preferably tandem OLED) at the 30-32" size. A 30" 5120x2880 16:9 screen is 196 ppi, which in the lower part of the Goldilocks pixel density range IMO, with a Retina distance of 17.6" and decent default text sizing if 2X scaled. I'd consider buying one of those (if affordable) to replace this 6K IPS screen I currently have, although I'd prefer to have a 6K 32", or else perhaps an ultrawide with similar pixel density.

1.) Is OLED equally good at displaying sharp text? Anybody here done a 'side-by-side' comparison between, say, text on IPS and OLED 4K 27" displays?

It would depend somewhat upon what the pixel arrangement is. My tandem OLED iPad Pro is pretty damn sharp for text, but it's 264 ppi. However, people typically hold iPads closer to their eyes than they would sit from a desktop display.

 

[bigglow]

Look, until 13 months ago, Apple sold brand-new $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM of non-upgradable RAM, the same way they had been selling $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM of non-upgradable RAM since 2012. And people on this website still defended them and I even saw people argue that really, with inflation, we were all getting our base amounts of RAM and storage for just amazing prices.

Unlike the iMac screen when the memory base line spec changed from 8GB to 16GB or 16GB to 24GB it applied across the board.

The same will be expected with the move of the small iMac from 21.5" to 24" with the large iMac 27" to 32".

I’m not Nostradamus but I imagine in 5 years, 8K will be the equivalent of what 4K was 6- 7 years ago (so attainable, on the cusp of being a standard). That’s how progress works. This will all be driven by content (as it always is) so if there aren’t a lot of 8K video, and 8K TVs and 8K upscaled games, we won’t see the displays. It will come to TVs first (after tablets and phones as another poster said), and TV makers love 8K because it’s a way to convince people they really need an 80” screen in their house you can see skin cells on or something.

Historically content resolution distribution models changes every 10 years or so.

- 2016 4K Blu-ray & worldwide 4K streaming
- 2006 2K Blu-ray
- 1996 480p DVD

As we enter 2026 in <1.5 months where is the 8K Blu-ray or 8K streaming?

Yeah, Apple always led me to believe the 27” was the one iMac they sold in real volume. Lots to schools, to offices, to families. But as @tenthousandthings eloquently said, I don’t think that Apple quite anticipated some of its use cases (a lot of creatives who or prosumers who used it as a great monitor and a very good, if not Mac Pro level, computer) and when it did do an iMac Pro, I think it gave us the worst of everything. Perhaps it is unfair and irrational, but I blame the failure of the iMac Pro (which was really just a very late reaction to the failure of the 2013 Mac Pro) on why Apple just exited the segment, and just did a redesign of the kitchen computer. Or maybe the plan was to try to make the ASD the new 27” iMac but they couldn’t get the thermals or whatever to work. Who knows.

TBH if you're outside of creative works with Hollywood-style accounting then people will look at the value proposition at the $1799-3199 range of the iMac 27" 5K.

To many it's great value for what you get. Given final macOS Security Update occurs nearly 120 months later with little to no fear of malware/virus/etc then it makes it worth buying into.

I've read on MR of users who want to continue using their iMac's >1 decade display because it still has a useful life unlike most Intel Mac hardware these days.

I see the 2013 Mac Pro and 2017 iMac Pro as trial and error that led to the Mac Studio.

Apple could've easily made the Mac Studio's current form factor as early as 2013 but they didn't see it as viable given it is essentially a taller pre-M4 Mac mini.

I've had the 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver but I never used the expansion slots inside. Better value would've been the 2002 iMac 17" G4.

 

[filmgirl]

Historically content resolution distribution models changes every 10 years or so.

- 2016 4K Blu-ray & worldwide 4K streaming
- 2006 2K Blu-ray
- 1996 480p DVD

As we enter 2026 in <1.5 months where is the 8K Blu-ray or 8K streaming?

So most 8K content won’t even really be 8K, it’ll just be 4K content upscaled to 8K using AI. And you may ask, “why would anyone care about that” and that’s a valid question to ask, and I’ll absolutely admit that my guess that in 2031, we'll have a lot of 8K TVs (and by extension, monitors) could be wrong. But the thing about TV makers is they love to sell you a reason for buy a new TV. It’s sort of the whole reason they exist as an ongoing concern.

And 8K, especially for sports, and especially with buzzwords like AI, is absolutely what I expect to see at CES this year and next year took, to set things up going forward.

The streamers will want to deliver the upscaled content too; it offers incentives to raise prices (or to charge advertisers more now that ads are back everywhere), do new types of re-releases, and on a more useful note, 8K (even if not rendered as such in device), is one of things you need for VR stuff to become really immersive.

It isn’t necessarily about utility; it’s about, “how do we sell more TVs.” We had the exact same situation with 4K, where even today, most 4K content streamed from Netflix or Apple TV (Apple TV has higher bit-rate than some other services for some purchased content, but for streamed originals it’s just as compressed as Netflix or HBO Max), is lower quality than HD content from Blu-ray, to say nothing of UHD BDR content. But it doesn’t matter! Your giant TV says it has better clarity. And the murderous government regimes that are buying up the international sports markets want to make sure European football and golf and the other things they buy can be captured on the latest cameras. And unlike 4K, no one has to pretend to care that linear/broadcast television still matters.

It could be a bust like 3DTV was, but there was a lot of resistance to 4K right up until there wasn’t. In my opinion, the biggest factor that will push 8K forward in TVs (and once it is in TVs it always trickles down) is that the average TV size keeps getting bigger and bigger. There was a time when a 65” TV was considered big. That's the average TV size sold for s lot of people.

I'm personally not a fan of gigantic screens just to be gigantic, but the number of people I know who have 75” or 85” TVs or projectors at home is quite sizable. And if you’re going to get into those larger sizes, 8K does make a difference here, even if the content is just being upsampled on device, to appear less pixelated and more fluid at closer range.

The second biggest factor is the AI buzzword stuff. If they do real-time upscaling on device, a lot of the “where is the content” problems go away. And then everyone gets to check having “growth mindset” off their list and march towards late-stage capitalism's warm embrace.

Meanwhile, your uncle who always asks about what TV to buy is really happy to watch NFL on Prime Video on his 98-inch 8K TV, because nothing says America like watching people give themselves CTE in startling clarity and a wide color gamut.

I’m not defending or even necessarily excited by any of this, but my cynic's heart never expects reason to prevail over commerce.

I'm not convinced 8K will be even close to mainstream for desktop computers in 5-6 years. There is no real mass market need for 8K at 32" (since that's 275 ppi - Retina at 12.5"), and most will not be buying 40" screens for 8K either (which is 220 ppi - Retina at 15.6").

For traditional desktop use case, I agree. But in the case of 8K monitors I fully expect the push to higher resolutions to be driven by the same people that have driven every increase in screen resolution on computers since the dawn of time: the PC gamers with disposable income. As with TVs, I could be hyper-optimistic on my 5 year prediction or just wrong, but I’ve learned to never discount the PC gamers with disposable income.

Now, as Mac users, most of us have no real concept of things like playing games less than 10 years old on our computers (hey but next year is the year Apple will finally care about gaming /s), but it turns out, that outside of our rarified HiDPi enclave of needing 2x integer scaling to be used with our Unix desktop systems, most of the people pushing higher resolution and higher frame-rate displays (as well as better panel materials) into the mainstream are the PC gamers. Now, I’m a loser console gamer with a Steam Deck who mostly built my last PC to look pretty, but the really hardcore PC gamers make the average Mac user look like the poors we often look down on Android owners as.

They might not spend $6000 on a display limited to 60 Hz, but they will spend that much and more on a GPU paired with a high-end CPU, along with water-cooled equipment to ensure those 1200 watt PSUs and components don’t explode like a Samsung phone.

And just as I get itchy when I don’t make my tithe to the church of Tim Apple each year, these folks get bored too. They want to push those settings to the max. See every level of detail, at the highest frame rate Display Port, HDMI, and Jensen Huang can muster. And the normies are already playing games at 4K 60 today, or at least aspiring to.

Everyone needs another mountain to climb, so by 2031, I absolutely expect the people keeping Valve printing money to be very focused on showing off their 8K displays with the framerate visible on their game of GTA VI (which might even exist by then!) in their “rate my setup” Reddit photos.

As Mac users, we might wind up immune from all of this, on the basis of our platform of choice being utterly inconsequential for anyone who has ever gone to PAX on their own volition, but just like 4K monitors and their impurities came into our sandbox despite the lack of proper scaling. And just as ultrawides got adopted, even though our operating system does tiling window management incredibly poorly (when modern Linux distros do it better out of the box, we should hang our heads in shame), I’m sure we will see whatever the gamers adopt trickle into our ecosystem too, even if just on the periphery.

 

[EugW]

? Gamers are not pushing much for higher resolution. Gamers are pushing for higher refresh rates. 4K 240 Hz is a much more meaningful upgrade than 8K. In fact, the current mainstream gaming standard is still only 1440p, up to 165 Hz when possible. In five years that will move to 4K 144 Hz.

 

[dropadrop]

Putting aside the issue of burn in (which I take it has been improved, mitigation strategies employed, is less an issue than it used to be and hopefully with ongoing improvements is a diminishing concern?), anybody know roughly how the lifespan of an OLED display compares to a similar IPS display?

I guess there is a big difference in the likelihood of burn in depending on the use case.

On a TV watching the same channel with a clear logo could cause it. With a gaming console some menu items. But in general the TV picture is always changing.

On a phone the layout of icons could do the same, but generally if the screen is open for a long time you are using various apps that have different layouts.

In both of those cases it’s pretty much an ”all in one” solution so the OS can also be optimized knowing what the screen is.

An office environment could be one of the harder places for that. A lot of users could spend all days looking at browser, email and word which are not necassarily full screen. On top of that the computer is made by somebody else and you can’t count on optimisations. So no wonder vendors started with gaming monitors where the usage patterns could be different.

But every device I have OLED on is an improvement to before, and I’d be happy to have one for my computer as well.

 

[tenthousandthings]

5.) Is there any known technical issue explaining why we don't see 5 or 6K mainstream OLED displays on offer, or is it just a matter of what vendors perceive market demand to be?

I have no idea about your other thoughts/questions, but Samsung Display has shown a prototype 5K 120Hz tandem OLED panel — that fact, combined with Samsung’s larger history of (how shall I put it?) jumping onto bandwagons, makes me think this is a coming trend and the technical issues (and costs) must be surmountable.

 

[tenthousandthings]

What I <3 about this is that R&D money from smartphones trickles down to larger devices like tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, theater screens and stadium screens.

I purposely left televisions out of the formula -- I don't quite understand how they fit into the science. My impression (not based on studying it) is they also get the technology first, because it's another big-money, high-volume business like phones. But it's not quite the same equation -- there are fundamental differences in how televisions are used (versus device displays and computer monitors), which puts them on a different, albeit parallel, track.

So by the time I replace my 2019 MBP 16" I'd get a perfected screen in 2029.

I think there's a decent chance that the late-2026 or early-2027 redesigned MBP chassis will anticipate hybrid tandem OLED (which, as I understand it, has an extra blue layer, the shortest wavelength) panels, even though that technology will not be ready by then (i.e., basically now, for a product due to launch in ~16 months at most). So, by 2029, you might actually get "Dream OLED" or at least the closest practical approximation of that lofty ideal that the industry has been able to achieve.

 

[tenthousandthings]

I definitely don’t think current macOS supports 8K — assuming you could get access to a reference monitor or a TV — as well as Windows/Nvidia do, but in theory the M4 supports

M2 Pro/Max/Ultra, M3 Pro/Max/Ultra, and everything from M4 and beyond supports it out of the box, even with the dual cables required for the old Dell 8K (now "unavailable" directly from Dell, it's on clearance sale on Amazon right now for $2,789) ...

Perhaps it is unfair and irrational, but I blame the failure of the iMac Pro (which was really just a very late reaction to the failure of the 2013 Mac Pro) on why Apple just exited the segment, and just did a redesign of the kitchen computer.

I'd add that it was probably also a key component of the decision to assert control and develop the M1 and M1 Pro/Max/Ultra in the first place (a decision that was surely taken all at once, in consultation with TSMC).

On that topic, I sometimes wonder if Apple might also become frustrated with the whims of the display industry and seek to assert greater control. Could "Apple Display" be born? It's not parallel to silicon and foundries, but I could see some kind of joint venture. In some ways, Apple Silicon is a joint venture between Apple and TSMC. Remember that LG Display started out in 1999 as a joint venture between LG and Philips.

Apple sort of lucked into the value, as it were, of using Mac minis and Studios for AI inference, and so I expect they are probably selling for more desktops today than in the 2010s.

It sounds like you have professional experience with this, but my pet theory is Apple will incorporate an optional high-speed networking interface (perhaps via Broadcom, a steering member of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium) into a future Studio, allowing it to be used even more effectively for that kind of thing -- the Nvidia DGX Spark board has a proprietary 400 Gb/s (ConnectX-7) connector, and the second generation of it will surely have 800 Gb/s (ConnectX-8). Apple will incorporate 400 GbE and eventually 800 GbE (and beyond) into the Studio.

 

[IvyKing]

? Gamers are not pushing much for higher resolution.

I suspect that the push for higher resolution comes from people dealing with images and lots of text. Reading a pdf on a retina display is a noticeably nicer experience than viewing the same file on a ~110dpi display. These are tasks that don't have much need for a high refresh rate, so priority for the data rate goes into higher resolution.

 

[drrich2]

In gaming there's often a focus on moving elements on the screen; if you are controlling a protagonist in a 1st person shooter or a racing car, the focus tends to be on moving elements. Higher resolution is still desirable, of course, but I wonder if, say, the difference between 4K and 5K on a 27" screen is as evident to a gamer as a non-gamer working mainly with text, etc.?