LG's UltraFine 5K display for Macs becomes unusable when placed near a router

In October of last year LG announced the UltraFine 5K, a monitor that was designed specifically to work well with Apple's Macs. This has been implied by Apple to be a successor of sorts to its now-discontinued Thunderbolt Display, and it's recommended by the company for new MacBook Pro buyers.

That's all fine and dandy, but if you purchase one of these to use as an external monitor for your MacBook, you may not be happy to learn that you can't place it near a wireless router. Seriously.

If your UltraFine 5K monitor is within two metres or so of a router, it will basically become unusable and take the Mac it's connected to down with it. Constant flickers, freezes, and disconnects are what you should expect in such a setup scenario, and you'll need to reboot your Mac a lot of times just to get things working again for a short while... until it all starts happening once more.

This issue has in fact been confirmed by LG support, and it's apparently specific to this monitor model. LG's fix? Well, naturally, telling you to place the monitor at least two meters away from your router. Everything should be fine then.

Update: LG has acknowledged the issue and promised to fix it in all upcoming units.

This obviously isn't a huge shortcoming, but it may be frustrating nevertheless, especially considering that the LG UltraFine 5K monitor has a normal price of $1,299. So keep this in mind before you decide to buy one.

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