How about that Apple Studio Display, yeah? If you've seen one up close and personal, you're probably as impressed as we are with its crispness and brightness; for a monitor that's only about three inches thick, it's a very nice image. And personally, we were blown away by the quality of its interpolated 640x480 and 832x624 resolutions-- since it's an LCD panel, those 1024x768 pixels are there to stay, yet the antialiased pixel-skipping approximation of those lower resolutions was pretty amazingly nice to look at, as opposed to the horribly jagged and ugly renditions we've seen on competing models. While we were bigger fans of the old "midnight blue" of the first models, the El-Capitan-matching Blueberry and Ice of the current models isn't bad, either-- and given that the color change accompanied a price drop to $1099, we think we can live without the midnight blue. Or we could, if we were in any kind of financial position to blow $1099 on a fifteen-inch monitor.

Whoops, did we say $1099? We meant $1299. Or, at least, Apple means $1299. While it's not behavior that we're used to seeing in the tech market, Apple's apparently thinking differently again and raising the price of its stylish LCD Studio Display. A quick visit to the Apple Store confirms what MacNN was reporting: the flat-panel Apple Studio Display is now listed at $1299. We checked a couple of third-party resellers and the price there seems to be holding steady at the lower value right now, but you can bet that'll change pretty quickly if Apple's raised the Minimum Advertised Price as reported. Remember back when Steve Jobs publicly claimed that "Columbus" was Apple's secret anti-gravity technology? Perhaps it's finished, and Apple's using it on its display prices.

That said, based on what we've seen in the marketplace, $1299 is still a great price for such a snazzy display, and to a certain extent, we think we understand Apple's logic: relatively few people are really going to be willing to drop $1099 on a display whose primary benefit, besides freeing up some desk space, is its "wow factor." But of those people who do want the LCD Studio Display and who were perfectly willing to blow $1099 on one, there are probably very few who wouldn't pay $1299 instead. We don't know what drove up the price; perhaps LCD panels themselves have started getting more expensive again. Regardless, it's a little sobering to consider that an LCD Apple Studio Display now costs a hundred bucks more than a complete 333 MHz iMac. Yowza.