With today’s availability of the 2023 Mac mini and MacBook Pro, two machines with the ability to drive 8K displays, Apple has published guidance on how to use these high-resolution displays with your Mac. In addition, these new Macs support higher 4K refresh rates up to 240Hz and expanded support for variable refresh rates (VRR).
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The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display may have the highest resolution screen in the world today, but it seems Apple will have to up its game next year if it wants to retain that title: 8K displays are expected to arrive sometime in 2016.
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has announced Embedded DisplayPort standard version 1.4a, which uses a new compression standard to support higher resolution panels, together with greater color depth and faster refresh rates. The new standard allows manufacturers to pipe around four times as much data to displays to support panels with resolutions of up to 8K.
The standard will also benefit machines with lower-resolution screens by enabling displays to be thinner, and extending battery-life in laptops by reducing the power required to transfer data to them.
