> an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development.

I have to disagree here. I use (and have used) a 1080p display for years and don’t feel the need for anything larger. That might be an artifact of my early years on 80x25 character displays, though.

> 80x25 character displays

I am sure Doom and other great pieces of software were written on one of those.

Not to take away from your point, but Doom was actually written on a NeXTstation and cross-compiled for PCs, so at a minimum they were using 1120x832 resolution (2 bit greyscale).

I use a Pro Display XDR for programming / design work, I think you forgot this one. It seems like it would fit your needs (with the obviously premium price) as it’s 32”.

It’s overkill for most, but still the best display I’ve ever used and I love it. I actually tried an Asus 4K 120hz for much less but the fan noise was a deal breaker even if the screen didn’t break on arrival (it did).

Disclosure: Apple employee

I think the Pro Display should be disqualified for the price :). Like with the new Mac Pro Apple made the dream Display/Machine for professional video artists with high-paying customer. As a price, they completely neglegted their power user base which requires something different than an iMac. I can only hope that either Apple or Dell makes a more basic version of that screen based on the same panel. And of course, on a high end screen I would expect more than one input. You might want to connect your laptop to your screen too... Alternatively, I am hoping for an iMac with a larger screen.

I'm impatiently waiting for a slightly less overkill 6K 32" option, it's obviously the best size + resolution for Mac.

My hope is that someone will take the panel and pair it with a ~700nit backlight (vs 1k sustained 1.5k peak for XDR) and price it around $2k. Also interested to see what Apple has in store for the iMac, if the refresh comes with a new and improved display I may just go in that direction.

+1, love my XDR for coding and designing: https://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use/

Great post! Noticed you have the Logitech webcam. I think it'd be helpful if you:

- Added a picture of the back of your 6k with the webcam. I'm sure it changes the look, however short the cable is.

- Address the lack of speakers. I see you mention using a bluetooth speaker or your home audio setup. What's it like using the MacBook Pro speakers?

- Added a picture of your setup + speaker if that's what you use regularly.

I love your minimalist look and have a similar one, but have been holding on to my LG 5k because of the speaker/webcam.

Thanks for this. You don't comment on the 60 vs 120 hz that is highlighted in OP opinion piece. Any thoughts on XDRs apparent lack of support for 120?

Color accuracy is far more important to me than 120hz capable. The faster displays today tend to be subpar at color accuracy, illumination uniformity, etc.

As someone who also stares a monitor for work have you noticed any difference in eye strain or comfort? I have two 4K monitors but considering going to 5K+. I liken it to shoes or a mattress. If we spend all day with X object it, then quality should be a priority.

No difference to eye strain or comfort vs the LG 5k I used before, although a major improvement vs my old 1440p monitor. Width makes a good improvement in Xcode and the color is very accurate to the iPhone screen which helps. I prefer one big monitor now I have this.

I agree with your analogy, literally my livelihood feeds through this screen, and I find a good monitor lasts a long time.

Apple-only monitor? That's ridiculous. You can change its settings only from apple device.

Same here. I'm using my Dell 3008WFP (also 30" @ 2560x1600) until something genuinely bigger & better comes out. I bought it over a decade ago and it still works great for programming.

I still use mine at work, and am extremely happy with it. The font rendering on my iMac 5k is better of course, but for work, the additional screen estate (especially vertically) is hard to beat. I am of course contemplating the 38" Dell with 3840x1600 :).

30" Cinema Display has better than 5k iMac resolution, but at 1x. 160 extra vertical pixels.

Still the best monitor around. $3000 MSRP now available used for $200-300.

On the other side of things, running dual 4k displays for anything remotely intensive (a browser, IDE, instant messaging, mail client, and terminal in my case) can bring some machines to a crawl or run the fans at high speeds indefinitely. I think graphics technology has to catch up to hiDPI before I'd go past 4k.

And let's not even get into the fact that 4k 60hz is a struggle and a half -- you need HDMI 2.0 or displayport to make it work at all, and many modern laptops lack either port, forcing you to use USB-C/thunderbolt with adapters that have poor spec support and even worse documentation.

Even if someone offered me dual 5k displays to replace my dual 4k ones, I would turn them down right now. Before we move on to 5k displays, we need to get 4k60 down. And while I'm on my soapbox... where the hell is 4k90 or 4k120? I only bought my 4k monitors last month, with virtually unlimited budget, but they just don't exist. I imagine they've fallen victim to the same issue: the cables to support it just barely exist, and certainly can't be doubled up for dual monitor setups without a mess of wires plugged directly into a laptop or desktop.

If you use a Mac, a 5k monitor with integer scaling (2x) will take fewer GPU resources to run than a 4K with fractional scaling (1.5x). This why I refuse to switch to a 4K monitor for now. Will do the leap to a 5k monitor but the options are very slim now.

I'm also hanging on to my 30" Apple Cinema (and adapters to work with a new USB-C MBP). The LG 5K seems like a decent replacement though, I'm not totally clear why it seems so unpopular.

I've been using two LG 5k monitors for years and they are excellent. They got a bad reputation when they were released for build quality issues, but I haven't had a single issue.

Why is everyone so attached to scaling? What is this shit software that 1) everyone relies on and 2) whose UI and font size can't be adjusted like any normal software (or web page) since the 90s? Is this yet another brainfart from Apple?

Probably something to do with the fact that macOS has handled high-dpi perfectly since 2012 and Windows is still struggling.

Windows has great High DPI support. It's Windows applications that often haven't seen upgrades since before even 2012. Windows' commitment to backward compatibility is the struggle. Windows hasn't had the option to just change processor architectures every dozen years on a seeming whim and subsequently force all software to be rewritten or die.

Mac apps didn't have to be upgraded to work with high dpi.

macOS X was released in 2001 with the "Cocoa" application UI library. While "Carbon" helped older Mac OS applications run for a limited time on OS X, no applications today use any graphics stack older than Cocoa's 2001 release, as the drop of all support for PPC-targeted apps insured that in macOS' switch to x86. (Cocoa had High DPI support baked in from NextStep, even if it took ~11 years to be "needed".)

Win32 was first beta tested by developers in 1992, and has had to remain stable and backwards compatibile to those first early 90s versions. There are still 32-bit apps written in 1992 that are expected to run unmodified on Windows 10 today. The last processor-architecture related API drop that Windows has been allowed by public perception and corporate strategy was Win16 support was dropped on 64-bit processors. (Hence why Windows on ARM has struggled and the current iteration of Windows on ARM now involves a 32-bit x86 emulator as a core feature.)

Mac apps did have to be upgraded, it's just that Apple has been much better at requiring upgrades. There's barely no comparison here. There is no way that you can possibly find today a version of macOS that still supports Mac Classic applications unmodified from the 90s (for instance 94's Glider Pro v1) with High DPI support, yet Windows absolutely must run applications from Windows 95. Sure, Windows sometimes still stumbles in High DPI support for pixel-perfect applications written three decades ago in the 90s, but it at least tries, macOS shrugged and gave up.

Scaling just works greatly as Apple implements it. Especially, if your screen has a 200ppi or larger. Trying to change the font sizes across all applications is a sysiphus task and eventually you end up with one, which doesn't behave greatly. Especially, if one of the applications is Linux running in a VM. I have a Dell 24" 4k - and for 4k at 2x, the screen should be about 22". But with macOS I can set it to a virtual resulution of 2300, which works great.

On my 15" MB Pro, I usually use the 1680 resolution, but if needed, I can quickly change it to 1920.

I think people just don't realize that you can change text size independent of scaling, even in finder.