My biggest issue with the 4k iMac is that it's highest scaling option (smallest elements) is less than what you get on a regular 4k display.

The iMac I belive is capped at "looks like 2560x1600" while my 4k display "looks like 3008x1692".

I believe you can "option+click" to reveal all the resolution, which would expose the higher native one.

Thanks, I didn't know I could do that. I've been using a 3rd party utility...

There is now also a button for “advanced resolution settings” in display settings menu, and behind it there is a toggle to permanently display all possible resolutions among the existing ones already there.

The iMac screen is actually not as good as the MacBook Pro screen; it's only 60hz and I think it's less HDR.

But the iMac screen is bigger and higher resolution - not sure about the latter but too lazy to check.

Those aren't the most important specs even if they sound like they are.

It’s important to those of us with aging eyes.

Higher resolution would make that worse. You want the opposite if anything.

Or just go for AR glasses and make the view as big as you want.

Why would high resolution make it worse? Just increase the screen DPI.

Anyway, the iMacs I have seen at the Apple Store has decently sized text.

> Why would high resolution make it worse?

Because the person you are replying to hasn’t learned about the existence of the resolution scaling setting yet.

Taking a higher resolution screen and setting it to low resolution because you can't see it does not have many advantages over a lower resolution screen.

Now, a control to change text size, that's actually different.

> Taking a higher resolution screen and setting it to low resolution because you can't see it does not have many advantages over a lower resolution screen.

It does. Rendering at high DPI, especially for text, is amazing.

Otherwise, it would be like claiming that there was no advantage to macbooks switching to retina displays back in the first half of 2010s. The display size didn’t increase, and the rendering scale was increased to make things on screen appear the same size. You have no idea how thankful my eyes were for that DPI increase.

I (in my 40s) finally gave in and got some reading glasses. Good decision. Now everything on my screen looks crystal clear and sharp and I can make the fonts as small as I like without eye strain. They do make distance vision blurry, though, which is annoying.

That's entirely relative to the person and task, bud

I guess the price starts to make sense if you think of it as MacBook + bigger monitor (- portability option) instead of just MacBook - portability

4.5k monitor, 4480x2250. The extra area around a 4K viewport and the M3 could make these into decent editing machines.

It's funny because technically even M1 is good enough for most editing jobs,...

But according to Apple, you need a sound proof dedicated room with 2 couches, and 4 external 4K monitors with a M3 Max and 128GB of memory! :D

Honestly it's getting ridiculous. I'm a dev and I can work on a macbook air no problem. My time wasted reading bad documentation or groking bad code is far more loss than the compile time difference! :)

I'm wondering, who will be their target market with the M3 Ultra? A professional who trains LLMs while producing Hollywood movies, that likes to work from the local Starbucks?

Maybe with M3 max they could finally claim "this thing can start Microsoft Teams in 3 seconds!"

For dev work I’d think where more muscle starts to make a big difference is with gargantuan codebases, think Chrome or Firefox or something where a full compile takes an hour.

Typically people have build servers for large compile jobs, and I hope for their sake that they have some incremental compile (ninja!) facilities!

I remember though, compiling UE4 in 2016, from scratch, was a half-day job on my non-potato PC.

In 2000, building our C codebase across Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows 2000/NT for a new release took about a full day.

Straight C code, so no templates or whatever else traditionaly slows down C++ codebases.

Yeah, but I'd prefer to have a dedicated build server if I ever need to do this (or renting something from the cloud).

> Honestly it's getting ridiculous. I'm a dev and I can work on a macbook air no problem.

That's not surprising. It may certainly depend on the kind of development work you do but in my experience web development has always been quite easy and lightweight on the hardware compared to audio or video production. Those tasks will absolutely make use of better hardware. Back when I was recording music big projects could easily struggle even on capable hardware.

Probably better thermals than a laptop.

> "A 24" 4k monitor is better than any laptop screen"

Of course it is. But just get a Thunderbolt or USB 4 external monitor, where a single cable charges your laptop and instantly connects however many wired accessories you want. Then you have portability when you need it and a big screen when you need it. Best of both worlds!