I think 39" is an awesome size for a monitor. First up, I'll say I'm really not bothered about pixel density on a desktop machine. I love Retina on my laptop,

I think 39" is an awesome size for a monitor. First up, I'll say I'm really not bothered about pixel density on a desktop machine. I love Retina on my laptop, but I never notice it's not there on my iMac - it's too far away from my face. 39" lets you do the wonderful thing I do with my secondary monitor right now - push secondary applications off to the side. I imagine what I'd do with this amount of space is have my text editor and a browser window roughly in the middle, and have terminal, Git, chat, etc peppered all around the outside. Even with a 27" I'm constantly hitting the sides right now. My main monitor can't do more than text editor + browser effectively. You get loads more productivity from additional space, I think for two reasons: less app switching, and being able to see EVERYTHING you're working on. Like taking over a fresh desk when you need to knuckle down on a task. In action films, when it gets serious, they go to a clean desk and unroll a giant map. Having a huge screen is the same thing. I imagine in a few years programmers and geek types will have, maybe, a 60" curved display that takes up most of the desk.