4 ms·

>Really the only reason to chase after this display for the screen itself is if you desperately care about having a 5K display that can display MacOS at pixel-p

>Really the only reason to chase after this display for the screen itself is if you desperately care about having a 5K display that can display MacOS at pixel-perfect resolution with no scaling. I don’t want to discount this: a lot of people care about that a lot, and for those folks, $1,599 sounds totally reasonable considering that the only other 5K option on the market is that buggy LG UltraFine. Doesn't this just scream "The Mac OS software is bad, so buy our bad monitor to make up for it". There's a reason no one else makes a 5K display, and there's no reason why people should need to worry about buying a specific resolution display. It's just a failure by Apple. Am I missing something?

Tagbert 5y ago
Mac users are used to "retina" resolution where the ppi is small enough that you cannot distinguish the individual pixels at the expected viewing distance. For a stand-alone monitor that is around 218-220 ppi. For a laptop that is around 240ppi and for a phone is is around 320+ppi. A 27" 5K display is 218ppi. A 27" 4K display is less than that and can be noticeable. In addition, while Mac OS does do scaling at 1x 1.5x and 2x, the 2x is crisper for text. 1x is usually too small for higher resolutions. Other manufacturers have gotten stuck on 4K for a while. they are adequate for many uses and cheap due to the high production volume. Before that it was 1080p screens and the industry was stuck at that for a long time except for specialized display that were higher resolution. Eventually manufacturing caught up and jumped to the next plateau. I expect it to eventually jump to the next plateau in a few years once we have even faster display connections. Regardless, it doesn't matter if 5K has any value to you. it does have a lot of value to Mac customers. Of course we'll see how many feel that that value matches this price. I certainly don't expect Windows users to purchase this display though it would for any that have thunderbolt connections. This is a bit like, "why would you want Thunderbolt, isn't USB-C good enough?" Sometimes it is and sometimes, you want something more.

Tagbert 5y ago

Mac users are used to "retina" resolution where the ppi is small enough that you cannot distinguish the individual pixels at the expected viewing distance. For a stand-alone monitor that is around 218-220 ppi. For a laptop that is around 240ppi and for a phone is is around 320+ppi. A 27" 5K display is 218ppi. A 27" 4K display is less than that and can be noticeable. In addition, while Mac OS does do scaling at 1x 1.5x and 2x, the 2x is crisper for text. 1x is usually too small for higher resolutions. Other manufacturers have gotten stuck on 4K for a while. they are adequate for many uses and cheap due to the high production volume. Before that it was 1080p screens and the industry was stuck at that for a long time except for specialized display that were higher resolution. Eventually manufacturing caught up and jumped to the next plateau. I expect it to eventually jump to the next plateau in a few years once we have even faster display connections. Regardless, it doesn't matter if 5K has any value to you. it does have a lot of value to Mac customers. Of course we'll see how many feel that that value matches this price. I certainly don't expect Windows users to purchase this display though it would for any that have thunderbolt connections. This is a bit like, "why would you want Thunderbolt, isn't USB-C good enough?" Sometimes it is and sometimes, you want something more.