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My next display might HAVE to be Eizo at the rate we are getting any affordable choices. LCD's are at a snail's progress for tech.
I will tell you I wish I went for a CG211 before they were discontinued rather than the 24". The older ones with the insane price tags ($2800 for a 21" display in the US) were just completely awesome. Most of the newer ones are wide gamut displays. This can make it a pain in the ass to get a perfectly neutral grey. Their software does have fewer bugs than NEC's spectraview. The only reason I suggest NEC is because it's fairly close and much less expensive. You do put up with more software bugs that aren't always fixed quickly, and their QC tolerance isn't as tight. I usually tell people to take a good look at it out of the box, and if by chance they get a bad one, just send it back immediately. Regarding input lag, many of them use overdrive circuits. Their grey to grey numbers are commonly shown with overdrive enabled, and it's usually on by default. I've read about reverse ghosting with this, but I haven't experienced it personally. In terms of NEC and Eizo, I've personally used quite a few from each brand in the past few years. I owned 2 NECs before switching to Eizo. Actually if I was thinking of switching back for cost reasons next time, I'd probably look at one of the non CG ones compared to the NECs.
Apple may have gotten better in the past few years. Someone linked me to a review on Anandtech which suggested that they're not going quite so excessive on backlight brightness or retaining the 7000K white point anymore. He measured 6300. It may have been a D65 target where either the display or instrument was a bit of, as most of those instruments are nowhere near perfect.
Whilst apple screens look nice, the quality of the screens themselves are often awful. I've found them unusable for photographic retouching, they hurt my eyes, there's glare, and certainly last time I bought a screen the specs were very low in comparison to what else was on the market.
I went with a formac in the end. Lovely screen.
I really wanted an Eizo
I own one. I liked the older (hitachi/mitsubishi panel) ones better. I should have bought one when chromix had them on sale.
I'll give you a couple suggestions to make your life easier. First of all darken your work area as much as possible. If it's near total darkness, that's great. You can use blackout curtains or whatever is necessary. Next turn the display brightness way down. Note the Eizos are balanced to be used between 80 and 120 cd/m2. This is much darker than your average consumer display, but they set their levels and make adjustments with this range in mind. Apple displays don't always seem to hold contrast really well when turned down that far, but if you can profile it (note I say profile because it really doesn't have much in the way of internal hardware controls) at roughly minimum brightness but not below 90 cd/m2 or so and still achieve 350:1 or so as a contrast ratio, it will meet your needs quite well. It's actually annoying to edit still imagery on a high contrast display. It just crushes your shadows. By the way, before profiling you should leave it on at that brightness level for 30-45 minutes. Keep the colorimeter plugged in for at least 10. I'd order from a place with a good return policy. That way if by some chance the results aren't very good, you can always send it back. Feel free to ask me questions if the software is giving you problems. Last thing to note is that if you're matching to a printing device, you may have to tweak the brightness up or down slightly to get a good visual match to your prints. Just make sure you re-profile if you do this. The issue isn't just the reflections. These displays are way too bright for your intended purpose when they are new.
Edit edit: I forgot to mention. Even with the Eizos they suggest extremely low ambient light levels. That's the typical thing for what you are doing, low display brightness combined with low ambient lighting whenever possible. There are plenty of places where it's not possible, but usually if they're doing any print matching, the lighting will be extremely controlled.
