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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but what's stopping you from buying a third-party screen and attaching that? Right now, I'm using a MBP with a Dell monitor. It would seem insane if the Mac Pro had a priority monitor interface.

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I do have a Dell 4k monitor (P2715Q), and it works really well and I have no complaints about its compatibility or picture quality. But I just like the Thunderbolt hub + monitor + charger solution, plus the webcam, and would've been great if these monitors came with Face ID.

The LG monitor sort of does this. But it's just ugly.

I had the Dell at my old job. Great picture quality! But 4K on 27“ is however still a compromise, since everything will show up too big when using 2x scaling. And when going for 1.5x or 2x things will get blurry. I now use 2x with smalller fonts in editors and browser zoomed out by default as a compromise.

But I’m really looking forward to have a real >200dpi desktop display for 2x scaling.

There are a lot of native size requirements that third party monitors don't meet as well. If you want 5K, which is the ideal for 2x 2560x1440 at 27", you're in a very different market. A 4k display running at 1x is easy to find, but a good 5K is a very different story.

This is why Apple sells the LG 5K display and why their iMacs have 5K displays when possible. Third party displays do work, but when you want to get into crazy town resolutions it's much harder to find them with high quality.

> A 4k display running at 1x is easy to find, but a good 5K is a very different story.

I have to ask - what's the value of 5k over 4k? 4k is already 'retina' quality (speaking of my 32" 4k as reference), what does another 1024 horizontal lines bring to the party?

I have a 31" 4K display and it's nowhere near retina dpi. I run it at 1x

At 27-inch, 5K gets you 2× the pre-retina resolution.

For one if you're doing 4k video editing you can view the video in its native resolution and see UI elements simultaneously.

Random super low quality image of this. http://noamkroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-...

That makes the most sense to me; I suspected something like that might be the answer. Thanks!

Nah.

My 13" MacBook Pro is 13.3" at 2560x1600 or 227 PPI.

My 24" 4K monitor is 24" at 3840x2160 or 184 PPI.

Your 32" 4K monitor is 138 PPI, so only 60% of the density of MacBook displays.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not at a sufficient pixel density; I can’t discern them in normal operation (display an arm’s length from my eyes).

Two Dell 4k monitors here, they are too skinny.

I'd like a 16:10 or even 4:3 monitor at 200+dpi, but they don't exist. (Maybe that IBM beast from ~2000.)

There are very few third-party 5K monitors and they're flaky.

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