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The Best Monitor For Mac I have Used! 4k 144hz HDR P3 Color!

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The Eve Spectrum (Eve is now Dough) is the best display I’ve personally used with a Mac, and you probably can’t get one. This 27-inch display packs almost everything you’d want for under $1,000. It’s the first I’ve used that meets or exceeds what I get from iMac displays.

Specs

A full IPS panel at 3840 by 2160, HDR with a 750-nit peak, 98% P3 wide color calibrated out of the box, G-Sync and FreeSync compatible, a 1 ms response rate and 144 Hz. There are two HDMI 2.1 inputs, a DisplayPort 1.4 input, USB-A and USB-C inputs, audio out and a 10 Gbps USB-C with 100 W power delivery for a single-cable connection to a MacBook.

It costs $800 on Eve’s website, plus $100 for the stand (which allows a good range of height adjustments, tilt and a full 90-degree rotation). It’s not a $5,000 Pro Display XDR.

Design

It looks amazing in picture quality and physical design: a plain black frame with no branding or LEDs, thin modern bezels, a thin case (from the front, like a Pro Display XDR without the stand) and a simple, sturdy stand. Other monitors with similar specs look ugly, have ugly stands, don’t get as bright or aren’t as color accurate. The LG UltraFine displays built with Apple in 2016 look dated, with a wobbly stand, and don’t match an iMac’s picture quality.

What I like

  • 144 Hz. I get the full 144 Hz on my MacBook Pro and even my M1 MacBook Air. Just as Retina displays ruined lower-resolution displays for me, the Liquid Retina XDR displays on the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and iPhone 13 Pro have ruined 60 Hz. Everything looks smooth, and it completes my transition. (Note: I had to use a Windows computer to update the firmware to version 105 before I could get 144 Hz on the Mac; depending on when yours was made, you may need to. It also matches the frame rate if you play games on your Mac.)
  • 98% P3 color out of the box. No more dragging windows to the MacBook display to check colors. It’s the display that most resembled a Mac display’s colors and brightness; BenQ came close with a “M-book mode,” but not quite, and even the LG UltraFine 5K doesn’t come close. Side by side with the MacBook Pro, I only made a minor white balance adjustment.
  • Brightness: up to 450 nits for standard content, slightly lower than the 500 nits of the MacBook, iMac or LG UltraFine (but have you worked at 500 nits for a long time? It hurts), and more than most displays at this price, which top out around 350.
  • HDR up to 750 nits looks surprisingly good, with 16 local dimming zones, but 16 zones is not enough: you can see the backlights turn on and off as an object moves. I don’t use HDR regularly, but it’s nice to have.
  • Single cable for display and charging.

Where the iMac wins

Resolution. 4K isn’t 5K: the Eve is 166 ppi vs. the 5K iMac’s 226 ppi. At the same scaled resolution (2560 by 1440), the 5K is slightly sharper when zoomed in, but side by side in regular use it’s hard to tell. If I had to choose between 4K at 144 Hz or 5K at 60 Hz, I’d pick the high refresh rate, though I’d ideally want 5K and high refresh rate, so we’ll see what Apple does.

Why you probably can’t get one

Eve has a long history. This display was originally crowd-funded, promising great specs at a much lower price (they also crowd-funded a Microsoft Surface clone). Even though you can order on their website, you may never receive it, which several YouTubers who got review units mentioned. I ordered in October anyway, assuming it was overblown or fixed. I paid a $100 deposit, was emailed that the order was almost ready to ship and paid the balance, and then nothing. In November they said a system error delayed the order until January; I asked to cancel and heard nothing; in January they said late January and I asked again to cancel, which they finally did.

Being enterprising, I checked eBay, and over a few weeks I snagged one for $700 including the stand, a bargain if $800 plus $100 is a good price. There’s a link in the description to check availability.

Verdict

It’s the single best external display I’ve used with a Mac, and I recommend it if you can get one. Other high-end displays like the Pro Display XDR or the Asus ProArt cost many thousands. Are you waiting to see what Apple does at its next event?

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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