Yes, you're completely right. I remember when the Atwood article came out, and I was convinced I needed multiple monitors to be productive (I was quite junior)

Yes, you're completely right. I remember when the Atwood article came out, and I was convinced I needed multiple monitors to be productive (I was quite junior) - it even caused me stress when I worked at places that didn't have multiple monitors. These days I'm pretty happy with a single screen - including feeling very productive on just a laptop screen. It turns out the whole idea of needing tons of desktop space was vastly exaggerated. You can't focus on 3 screens at once, it is impossible. Even on a large screen you can only look at one place at a time. Programmers are focused on one thing for a long period of time anyways - your code editor. Maybe a terminal as well that you need to swap to occasionally. Having multiple monitors has limited benefits. Where multiple monitors is helpful is if you're an operator - you are watching many dashboards at once to observe if things break or change. Traders for example will have workstations with 9 screens at once. But this makes sense - they are not focusing on one thing at a time, they need to quickly look at multiple things for anything unusual. I've personally found that using a tiling WM gives me vastly more benefits than multiple monitors ever would. Although I was also pretty happy using Gnome's super-tab/super functionality during my non-tiling days. 4K is sort of a nice to have, but hardly a requirement. I'm as happy on a normal DPI screen as I am on a retina screen. Our brains adapt very quickly and unless the text is overly blurry (because of poor hinting implementations), a regular DPI screen is perfectly fine for coding on. My own personal preference is high refresh rates over anything else - I can't stand latency.