Most hours on a creative workstation are SDR hours, spent in a grey application interface and a browser full of review notes. That is the half of the day the review's drawback lands on [5], while the praise lands on HDR work a colorist might do for an hour [4]. Same panel either way, and the purchase turns on which half you are buying for.
What is being pitched is HDR for people who were priced out of it. Wired frames content-creation monitors as slow to adopt OLED compared with gaming displays, with Asus one of the few vendors building for non-gamers [14]. What is being bought is a $699 line item [1] that sits on a desk for years and spends most of that time showing things that do not need absolute blacks [17].
The macOS note is the part that should move a purchase order rather than a score. "Some quirks when connected to macOS" is a sentence one buyer can shrug at and a studio ordering a dozen cannot [5], and the review does not say which quirks. The cheap way to retire that is one unit, on the same laptop model and OS build the team actually runs, left in place for a week before the rest of the order goes in.
On alternatives, Wired counts three non-gaming OLED monitors in total [16]: this one, the Dell 32 Plus QD-OLED, and the Samsung M90SF, which it calls far more expensive [7]. Dell's is 31.6 inches against Asus's 27, so 4.6 inches more diagonal [15], which Wired trades against sharpness and desk space [6]. Dell also has speakers worth using, which this one does not [13].
Two axes, then: the share of the week that seat spends in HDR, and whether the laptop plugged into it is a Mac. HDR-heavy on Windows is the clean case, since $699 buys an HDR-capable OLED to people the review says could not previously afford one [2]. HDR-heavy on macOS is the same buy with a single tested unit in front of it. Light HDR use on Windows means paying for contrast that shows up in a dim room and giving up brightness that shows up at noon [5]. Light HDR use on a Mac fleet is the quadrant where the cheapest OLED in the ProArt line [3] is still the wrong monitor, and the money belongs in something brighter.
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