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LG Confirms 5K Mac Monitor Has Issue When Placed Near a Router, Says New Batch To Have Enhanced Shielding (recode.net) 67

Posted by msmash from the better-protection dept.
Late last month, we learned that LG's UltraFine 5K Display, which was designed in part by Apple to work with the new MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display, would flicker, disconnect, or freeze computers if placed within two meters of a router. The company has acknowledged the issue, and says it will add enhanced shielding to its 5K monitors to prevent interferences with nearby wireless routers in the upcoming batch. From a report: "LG apologizes for this inconvenience and is committed to delivering the best quality products possible, so all LG UltraFine 27-inch 5K displays manufactured after February 2017 will be fitted with enhanced shielding," the company said in an email. Existing models will be able to be retrofitted with the enhanced shielding, which will allow the monitor to be placed near a router.
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LG Confirms 5K Mac Monitor Has Issue When Placed Near a Router, Says New Batch To Have Enhanced Shielding More

LG Confirms 5K Mac Monitor Has Issue When Placed Near a Router, Says New Batch To Have Enhanced Shielding

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  • Go fuck yourself... (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 )

    Existing models will be able to be retrofitted with the enhanced shielding, which will allow the monitor to be placed near a router.

    For a fee.. on a $1000 piece of hardware that we engineered poorly. Fuck off with that.

    • Existing models will be able to be retrofitted with the enhanced shielding, which will allow the monitor to be placed near a router.

      For a fee.. on a $1000 piece of hardware that we engineered poorly. Fuck off with that.

      For those of you on a budget. [h-cdn.co]

  • That word coming from any business, large or small, just makes me f**king livid. I've paid money for a working thing/service. This isn't an inconvenience, this is me losing my hard-earned money on something that doesn't work. The proper response is: Send back your old monitor and we'll send you a new one, on us.

  • Are they implying there was any kind of shielding on the failed series ?
    Retrofitted sounds like 'we will add the missing part'.

  • EMC/UL testing?! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ambient Sheep ( 458624 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @03:30PM (#53798247)

    How on earth did this ever pass EMC testing (or the UL equivalent)?!

    The company I worked for spent a small fortune modifying all our designs back in 1999 to be immune to external RF interference (and likewise to generate none) in order to pass those tests, how the hell could something like this happen in this day and age?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      There is no requirement to be immune to external RF. The requirements are all about EMISSIONs of RF.

      UL is concerned with safety. If the monitor doesn't catch fire when a router is near it UL does not care.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Wrong, wrong, wrong. To be sold in Europe, you have to pass CE. CE is concerned with susceptibility along with emissions and safety.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          CE is self-certification. Have fun with that!

        • As in certain other fields of engineering, the regulatory tests are sadly inadequate at determining whether a product will meet real-world requirements. The particular shortcoming I'm thinking of in this context is the fact that the susceptibility test has to be run at frequencies that stop well short of either of the main wifi frequency bands. (From memory: only up to 1.2GHz or so). The standard also describes a test at higher frequencies which include both of the wifi bands but it is optional.
      • It is true that there is no requirement about intereference resistance(unless perhaps you are selling fancy gear to the DoD or the like); but, unless rather carefully engineered, badly shielded systems tend to leak both ways; and a contemporary high resolution display isn't exactly short on very high frequency signal lines and similar sources of RF noise.

        The FCC doesn't care if your device falls over as soon as someone gives it a funny look; but unless this display was beautifully engineered for low emis

      • There is no requirement to be immune to external RF.

        That depends on the device. Telecoms certainly has susceptibility requirements baked into the regulation, because I designed telecoms gear to those specs.
        I imagine other safety critical like airplanes and medical equipment things have susceptibility requirements too.

        In the USA no one care about your TV. In other places around the world where logic is a little more prevalent, emissions and susceptibility requirements sometimes go together because otherwise how do you know what level to set the emissions at i

      • UL is concerned with safety.

        UL is concerned with fire. The name 'Underwriter's Laboratories' is the clue that it is an organisation set up to save the insurers money by limiting fire risk.
        The FCC is concerned about spectrum allocations and equipment trespassing on those allocations, so they are concerned with emissions.

        In the EU for instance, the CE requirements are ultimately coming from the government instead of the insurance industry or spectrum troll and so they concern themselves with more than just fire and emissions.

    • (or the UL equivalent)?!

      Because the tests don't require your device to operate in an RF environment. They require not to be permanently damaged, and not permanently damage downstream devices.

      In order of likelyhood I'm going to go with:
      1. Your company produce critical equipment, not a toy computer monitor.
      2. Your company produced equipment that interfaced to other equipment which it could potentially damage.
      3. Your company cared, something that died towards the end of the dot.com era.

      • (or the UL equivalent)?!

        Because the tests don't require your device to operate in an RF environment. They require not to be permanently damaged, and not permanently damage downstream devices.

        In order of likelyhood I'm going to go with:
        1. Your company produce critical equipment, not a toy computer monitor.
        2. Your company produced equipment that interfaced to other equipment which it could potentially damage.
        3. Your company cared, something that died towards the end of the dot.com era.

        4. It was a UK company that primarily had to comply with European CE certification which, as an AC above said, DOES mandate immunity to interference as well as generating it (until now, I wasn't aware that FCC was only one way for most gear). Also, as has been said, it's very difficult to do one direction without the other.

        Plus a bit of 2, and me getting UL mixed up with FCC (thanks for the info, btw, you and a couple of other posters) because I never had to worry about how we got certificated in America.

        • as an AC above said, DOES mandate immunity

          Again immunity is not an all encompassing word that is defined in isolation. There are MANY products with CE marks which will happily fall over when exposed to RF. One of the more clearly defined parts is that it doesn't get *damaged*, not that it continues to work. These generic self-certifications are not the limiting factor here, and just because it doesn't work near a WiFi router doesn't mean it fails any immunity requirements for these generic crappy bottom of the pile standards.

          There are however many

  • I'm sick of the generalization that all Wireless access points are "routers".

    They're ROUTERS if they ROUTE between two different networks. If they are simply an access point to which you connect your wireless device to a wired network, they are referred to "ACCESS POINTS". Yes, some WAPs have routing functionality as well, along with a built-in switch, firewalling ability, blah blah blah. Doesn't make all WAPs "Wireless Routers" though.

    I guess that kind of thing doesn't matter these days anymore though. Get

    • This! I'd also like a VDSL modem without any CPU+firmware, as they are soon forgotten by manufacturers, especially after vulnerabilities in ancient kernels or libraries. I guess one reason for the "router" idea is to keep clueless consumers behind NAT for better security, but it's only ironic if the routing firmware itself is compromised, and there's no way to fix it. (I'm not even starting with the GPL violations.)

      Simple bridges to Ethernet seemed more common in the early days, more so with cable than D

  • Did Apple try one of these things ? (Score:3)

    by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @04:06PM (#53798557)
    Did Apple try one of these things before recommending it, highlighting it in the MPB rollout?

    People sometimes have their wifi router sitting behind their monitor. Hell, I bought a couple of add on shelves for an Apple monitor so my cable modem and wifi router are literally sitting on the back of the the monitor. Pretty damn convenient for keeping crap off the desk.

    This is an Apple failure in part, not solely LG's.

    • Re: Did Apple try one of these things ? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, crashing macs when connecting to an external, but recommended, display is apple's fault. But shoddily made hardware sold by a different company is most certain not Apple's fault. Although they will get deservedly hammered for it anyway.

      • No, crashing macs when connecting to an external, but recommended, display is apple's fault. But shoddily made hardware sold by a different company is most certain not Apple's fault. Although they will get deservedly hammered for it anyway.

        When you shut down your own display line and **recommend** a particular 3rd party make/model as the premier display for your new line of computers, yes, you deserve to get hammered.

    • Did Apple try one of these things before recommending it, highlighting it in the MPB rollout?

      Yes. I'm sure it was tested in within a Faraday cage in a totally white room by someone left handed. The same left handed person who released an iPhone that had a signal strength close to nothing when right handed people were holding it wrong.

      Real answer: No. Companies don't test shit like this. They plug it in, see it's good to go, check that their partner is ISO9001 certified and push it out the door.

      • No. Companies don't test shit like this. They plug it in, see it's good to go, check that their partner is ISO9001 certified and push it out the door.

        Actually when you are shutting down your own display line and recommending a particular make/model 3rd party monitor to all your customers as the premier monitor for your new line of computers, you might do a little more than look for the ISO checkbox. And that testing might include some "eating your own dog food" type testing on a real desktop or two.

        • you might do a little more than look for the ISO checkbox.

          You might but there's little evidence of that happening. A lot of companies are happy to recommend something, even something premier based on past performance of a partner with little further testing. There is definitely an opinion at higher ranks that everything a partner app shits out is gold and they can do no wrong (this isn't Apple or IT specific by the way, I've seen that everywhere I've worked).

          However this being said, this is the same LG that provided the panels in previous Apple displays which also

  • I did a whole bunch of research prior to upgrading my computer at work, and it's clear that Apple has *really* botched their latest Macbooks. We're already, what? 5 months post release and the number of available USB-C devices are laughably small. Which I guess makes sense, since they are too damn cheap to provide a sufficient number of USB-C ports on the machines themselves. If you're going to produce a laptop that is essentially useless without an entire drawer-full of external adapters, then you need t

    • I did a whole bunch of research prior to upgrading my computer at work, and it's clear that Apple has *really* botched their latest Macbooks. We're already, what? 5 months post release and the number of available USB-C devices are laughably small. Which I guess makes sense, since they are too damn cheap to provide a sufficient number of USB-C ports on the machines themselves. If you're going to produce a laptop that is essentially useless without an entire drawer-full of external adapters, then you need to have a full lineup of those friggin adapters, hubs, docking stations, etc.

      If that wasn't bad enough, the stuff that does exist are garbage. For example, look at the reviews for the HDMI USB-C connector. 1/5. The thing loses connection if you so much as look at it wrong.

      And now this nonsense with a $1300 monitor that was explicitly recommended by Apple.

      This is flat out unacceptable. Period. The whole point of paying the Apple premium is that you have assurance that everything Just Works(tm). Apparently Apple doesn't care about that anymore.

      So my final decision was to buy a refurb of last years model. I get to reuse the existing hoard of adapters I already have, and it still has a normal USB port, magsafe power, HDMI and an SD card slot.

      The reason why you haven't seen a flood of printers and scanners, etc. with USB-C is because they simply don't need it.

      However, If you had actually done any research, you would know that USB-C is 100% compatible with USB 1.0 to 3.0, and therefore a $6 USB-C to USB-B cable [amazon.com] ($8 for the USB 3.0 version [amazon.com]) (both completely passive) is all you need to magically transform your existing USB printer, scanner, etc.into a USB-C-compatible device. That's it; no updated drivers, no fancy adapter dongles, NOTHING. Or, y

      • However, If you had actually done any research, you would know that USB-C is 100% compatible with USB 1.0 to 3.0,

        And if you weren't a pompous gaslighting windbag, you would know that I DID do my research. I know *exactly* how many ports the macbooks come with. I know the available combinations of storage and ram available across the different models. I know exactly how Apple is artificially restricting options on the lower tier devices to force you to buy the higher ones because I spec'ed it all out. And I know perfectly well what is available as far as dongles go. And I am ESPECIALLY aware of just how breathtaki

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by torkus ( 1133985 )

          Actually the helpful folks over at Dell have readily available USB-C (WD-15) and TB (TB-16) docking stations.

          I've personally tested the WD-15 with a MBP with good results (though you do need a windows laptop to update the firmware).

          Dell is even kind enough not to lock their hardware to only their brand.

          • Oh nice! Somehow that device completely escaped my radar. Partially cause I never even considered that Dell might make such a thing.

            When you were testing, did you check the multi-monitor functionality? I was reading info about a different port replicator and they specifically expressed their frustration in how Apple artificially limited the number of video streams to 1, despite the port easily handling more.

          • Addendum. It's not actually for sale yet. :( .

            I've found easily a dozen+ docking stations available, but not a single blessed one is currently available for purchase right now, which was the thrust of my lament.

        • You call me an idiot, and you can't even spell "Masturbate"?

          Apple is not "restricting" anything, you pompous fool.

          The DisplayPort 1.2 Standard that is embedded in TB3 is what controls how many Displays-per-Port; not Apple.

          And as far as "Artificially Restricting", I assume you are talking about the fact that the Dual-Core CPUs used in the MBP 13 have only enough PCI-e Lanes IN THE CPU to support 60 Gbps of I/O, rather than the 80 Gbps that the Quad-Core CPUs used in the 15 inchers do. So, talk to Intel
  • Dear Apple customer, you should have known that Apple computers emit strong electro-magnetic brain-control waves, which might interfere with non-Apple-products which were not hardened against this radiation. Thus, please equip your LG monitor with a tin foil head for undisturbed function. And don't you dare putting one on your head as well!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Let's say it together: "Wireless Access Point." There, I knew you could do it. A router is not the same thing, although many wireless access points are also routers, not all are, and not all routers have wireless features!

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