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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s more of a “the market won’t pay for quality” problem. People won’t pay thousands of euros for a good monitor, so manufacturers have to slap together the parts available in bulk in order to reach price points people will pay. The LG 5K is a good example, because it is clearly compromised to reach a somewhat reasonable price point. From what I can tell the monitor market mostly exists to cater to the generic business monitor and pc gamer markets anyway, as those are the only parts still selling in volume.

Although I have to admit that I was equally frustrated when I wanted a good retina screen with 200-ish dpi to pair up with the mac mini I wanted to buy, only to conclude getting the 5K iMac instead was the most sensible option.

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I don’t think that’s it.

Apple is the most valuable company on earth right now, entirely due to their thesis that people will pay for quality hardware.

The “creator” market is much more profitable than the gamer market where kids only have as much as mom will allow them to spend (vs The tech workers, coders, designers, youtubers, etc that need high quality displays to make a living).

It’s why Apple is able to get insane 50% margins in many products. It’s crazy to me that the big Asian manufacturers don’t see the market opportunity in catering to this crowd.

In their minds you’re either an office drone using excel or a gamer who wants neon lights. Both of which are market segments with terrible margins.

There are tons of expensive monitors available that cater to the professional market. The whole premise is not based in reality. Apple simply has the highest mindshare among average products.

There’s literally no good monitors with the proper resolution for MacOS outside of the fragile LG ultrafine line.

It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem, nobody is making 27” 5k displays right now.

What does "proper resolution for MacOS" mean in this case? There are tons of 27" 4k that work fine in macOS in Retina mode and matches the medium tier iMac (their low end today is still 21.5" 1080p). Unless you declare everything below 5k subpar, I don't see where you're coming from.

I don't have the exact numbers in front of me at the moment, but a 27" 4K monitor will not match the pixel pitch of every other Mac -- screen elements appear larger when both are set at the same scaled resolution.

Yeah, to match the dot pitch apple is designing for, the 4K monitor would have to be more like 22 inches instead of 27. We know this since the 4K iMac is a 21.5 inch screen.

This article from 2016 explains the problem: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

Basically, the ideal PPI of mac displays is a multiple of 110 PPI. So, for retina quality you need a display of roughly 220 PPI, which is what you get from 5K at 27 inch. A 27 inch 4K display is around 160 PPI. If you use that in 2x mode, things will appear too large. If you set it to scaled mode to make things appear the proper size, there are display artifacts (like shimmering when scrolling). In fairness, it's not super obvious unless you know what to look for. But if you're already spending money on a high end screen, why should you have to compromise?

That seems pretty outdated information, given that the OOTH default Retina scaling in MacBooks have been non-2x fractional since 2016 (1400x900 for the 13-inch's 2560×1600, 1680×1050 for the 15-inch 2800x1800).

I never thought I'd want a 16:10 monitor until I had to deal with all of my apps getting resized every time I unplug my MBP

What's extremely frustrating is that Apple makes an excellent 27" 5K monitor in a nice housing for $1800. The only problem is that it comes with an iMac...

So clearly, Apple could sell a monitor for about $1600, that would be perfectly compatible with Mac Pros, mac mini and as a secondary monitor for all the various MacBooks.

I genuinely don’t understand why they stopped doing that...

Maybe it's related to the reason why you can't use the 5k iMac as an external monitor. I can't remember where I found the sources, but the problem was that they essentially needed to video cards to drive the thing and making sure that both sides of the output looked identical was tricky and not something that an external source would be able to do.

IIRC it was an issue with the video connection. Nothing at the time could provide enough bandwidth to support 5K, so Apple had to cobble something together. With USB-C and TB3, that's no longer an issue.

iMac is due for a refresh soon, and I'm hoping that this means an M1 iMac that can serve as a Thunderbolt Display

I think "gamer with neon lights" is certainly a segment with amazing margins, especially compared to standard office equipment. Most "gaming" mice/keyboards/chairs/computers/whatever are just decorated and brightly coloured versions of other products with insane markups. Alienware PC's are a great example here - The parts in one of those PC's can cost around half the cost of what the company actually sells it for. Other peripherals have similar price increases once they're branded as a device for gaming rather than office use as they know consumers are willing to pay more. I realize that there are lots of kids who want "gaming" gear (that their parents will pay for) but the PC gaming market is certainly geared towards mid 20's/30's who have the scratch to be able to afford this stuff. Not that these people are stupid or misinformed for doing so, some simply appreciate the aesthetic (even if it's something you or me might not particularly like).

I don't know very many young PC gamers. Is the market for good gaming hardware really that small?

> The “creator” market is much more profitable than the gamer market where kids only have as much as mom will allow them to spend (vs The tech workers, coders, designers, youtubers, etc that need high quality displays to make a living).

This is a common misunderstanding of the gaming market due to stereotyping. The biggest age category in gaming is 18-34 by far. They generally also slant strongly to people with both more than average disposable income and higher likelihood to spend that same on gaming and related electronic toys. This makes gaming a 100 billion dollar market atm which is still growing rapidly.

> Both of which are market segments with terrible margins.

Not even close to accurate. Gaming related hardware is generally quite high margin. There's a reason ASUS et all use their gaming imprints as the place to introduce new high end parts. It's also a highly concentrated and networked market, making it very efficient to advertise to.

Fully agreed. It's impressive how "Gaming" brands upselling their products with RGB.

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