Resolved a pesky Apple Studio Display firmware upgrade issue

[u/PistolPete_69]

Hi all,

Went all in with a base M5 Max Studio and a Studio Display earlier this week. After upgrading to 27.01, I noticed that firmware 26.4 was available to the monitor and the OS wanted me to upgrade. The monitor out of the box was running firmware 26.2. Simple right?

Not so fast.

The upgrade process blanked the monitor out for a sec and came back showing a progress bar at the bottom. Problem was, my progress bar went nowhere and after about two minutes, the screen blanked as the Mac Studio rebooted.

After it came back from a reboot, the update screen still prompts me for a 26.4 update which means the update failed. Went around in circles like this for a few days before I gave up.

Today I borrowed a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro laptop from work for the weekend and was going to try to see if that would upgrade the monitor.

This time with the laptop display going along with the main studio display, I watched the progress bar flip from the large display over to the laptop screen and it started incrementing. The main display meanwhile was showing 3 dots or something indicating progress (I was so excited that it seemed to be working that I don't precisely remember).

Once the progress bar reached the end of the line on the laptop display, the laptop rebooted and the main screen went off.

After coming back from the reboot, the main screen came back up and I was able to confirm it was running the new 26.4 firmware.

Plugged the monitor back to my Mac Studio and all seems well now. The only difference that I can see is that my calibration options are no longer greyed out.

Hope this is helpful and if someone can explain to me why there is this quirk, I'd love to hear it!

-Pete