Monday, December 29th 2025
Apple Studio Display 2 to Pack an A19 Chip, Come with ProMotion and HDR
Apple is preparing to update its Studio Display lineup in 2026 with the new Studio Display 2. Targeted squarely at creators, photography professionals, and video production crews, the new Studio Display 2 will be designed to ideally go with Mac Studio and Mac Pro workstations. Studio Display 2 surfaced in a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who identified code in an iOS 26 build pointing to display "J527" as confirmation of a new Studio Display. Perhaps the biggest reveal from the code is that Studio Display 2 will come with ProMotion, and variable refresh rate. It will support a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz, up from the current 60 Hz of Studio Display.
The current Studio Display isn't just limited to 60 Hz, but also only has standard dynamic range (SDR). Studio Display 2 is expected to introduce HDR support, leveraging Mini LED technology. This would be similar to the latest MacBook Pro display offering ProMotion and HDR with up to 1,000 nits brightness using Mini LED illumination for sustained lighting, and an impressive 1,600 nits for HDR. Apple will likely use the latest display tech to offer a feature-packed HDR implementation for content professionals.
Lastly, Apple is expected to upgrade the SoC driving its display. The current Studio Display uses an 7 nm Apple A13 SoC, which is expected to be overhauled with the latest 3 nm Apple A19 chip. This chip will be responsible for various display-side processing and connectivity tasks, and come with various calibration features. Apple is expected to unveil Apple Studio Display 2 in 2026 alongside a next-generation Mac Studio workstation powered by M5 series SoCs.
Sources:
Macworld, Bloomberg
The current Studio Display isn't just limited to 60 Hz, but also only has standard dynamic range (SDR). Studio Display 2 is expected to introduce HDR support, leveraging Mini LED technology. This would be similar to the latest MacBook Pro display offering ProMotion and HDR with up to 1,000 nits brightness using Mini LED illumination for sustained lighting, and an impressive 1,600 nits for HDR. Apple will likely use the latest display tech to offer a feature-packed HDR implementation for content professionals.
13 Comments on Apple Studio Display 2 to Pack an A19 Chip, Come with ProMotion and HDR
Or maybe this will use binned A19s with 2 cores disabled or something like that.
It’s absolutely wasteful, but this is either Apple attempting to further give this a halo status, or the yields on A19 are very good indeed… or they aren’t selling as much 17s as they would initially expect too. Who knows. The chip is obviously overkill.
Also, the current Studio Monitor actually runs full fat iOS under the hood, and presumably this will too.
I'm sure price will be enormous, but the horrible 60Hz era is finally ending even at the professional level.
Since it has a full smartphone chip, it would be cool if you could just use it as a stand-alone computer.
I don’t think more than 120 Hz is much of a benefit on the desktop and my display is capable of 240 Hz.
But maybe people have different wishes here too? :)
I still don’t think the majority will notice much difference at the desktop going from 120 Hz to 240 Hz and it will just use more energy. But, VRR can be used of course.