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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

I think Apple is trying to force the hand of monitor manufacturers towards 4k or higher. The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire.

Buy the GHR1050PQS75-UHW204773! It’s got garbage white uniformity, terrible black levels and IPS glow, cheap plastic housing and settings software that feels like it was created in 1994. Wirecutter recommended!

Compare this to the TV industry, where you can get amazing picture quality with OLED and at least somewhat decent levels of software competence.

Meanwhile desktop monitors (something most of us spend 8 hours a day in front of) are stuck using 30 year old LCD tech and most aren’t even 4k yet.

The entire PowerPoint/excel crowd seemingly has no problem spending most of their waking hours staring at giant pixels all day, even if the laptop screen they have sitting next to the monitor has almost 3X the pixel density.

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> I think Apple is trying to force the hand of monitor manufacturers towards 4k or higher. The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire.

Please stop apologizing for Apple's customer-hostile behaviour here. A $2 trillion company should be able to make an external monitor not look like blurry trash when connected to their hardware.

The fact that it takes someone to make a third-party app to fix what Apple can't speaks volumes to how much they care about/understand their customer base. Apple should have tested M1 hardware with hot garbage external monitors, realized the customer experience sucked, and fixed it.

Don't know about Apple, but maybe those external monitors shouldn't be such "hot garbage"?!

Not all external monitors are "hot garbage" and it was probably my mistake to use that term.

Apple could always choose to add some "innovation" to the external monitor market by manufacturing their own line of displays. [1] For example, they have a nice 4.5K display in the iMac, but they won't sell it as a monitor for some reason.

Instead, they offer exactly one external monitor that starts at $4999 USD.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Cinema_Display

Oh, from my PoV all those 4K displays are hot garbage.

It'd be quite nice if Apple would upend the external monitor market but usually they prefer serving their own market instead. And as an Apple user today you are quite spoiled indeed...

> The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire.

I last few years we've seen a massive shift towards ultrawide, high (dynamic) frame rate and HDR screens from pretty much all manufacturers. Many of those technologies Apple just didn't support until recently. They still don't support DisplayPort MST for use of many bigger monitors in daisy configurations.

So, what are you talking about? Did you even check the market outside the Apple store?

Yes, I spent almost a month researching the entire market and every single offering available.

Nearly every ultrawide you speak of has very poor pixel density. 4k spanned across 34+ inches diagonally looks pretty terrible when you view it at the distance most people sit from their monitors.

I can’t seriously be the only one who can tell the difference. Have you ever compared how text looks on your phone or laptop screen compared to most monitors available today?

Never thought I would see the time 4K isn't enough anymore!

4K was only ever enough for 24" monitors, where you can use a clean 200% scaling.

If you've already moved on to 27" or higher, 4K was never enough!

That's why Apple makes their 27" iMac 5K. 4K is almost enough.

Ironically it's not easy to find a current-gen 4k 24"

They stopped selling the Dell UP2414Q! What a shame. So it looks like the only option is the pricy LG Ultrafine 24MD4KL.

There's also only a single 5k display on the market (also from LG).

It's a shame that there are so few high res displays on the market, and they are all 16:9...

LG also has the 24UD58 for $300

It wasn't enough to start with for large monitors. High pixel density is important for text readability. A 30" screen at typical monitor distance has very few pixels per arcsecond.

It all depends on how close you sit to the screen. What matters is pixel density, and that’s a function of both the resolution and how close you’re sitting.

So if you have a 4k TV and a 4k monitor, there’s actually quite a difference. If your monitor is bigger than 24” you’re getting way worse pixel density and visible pixels at the distance you’re sitting.

On TVs it’s typically never a problem because you’re sitting far enough away.

Agreed, there are few/no options if you have decent eyesight and want high pixel density.

Even if you don't have decent eyesight crisper text is easier to read than a blurry mess of pixels representing letters.

Indeed, still nobody makes the monitor I want – a double-wide 4K (or 5K) 27".

The closest we have now are some wide 5K's with good DPI and the Dell 8K.

Yep, text looks nicer in 4k. So what? 1080p is still plenty workable. I remember the jump from my 1024x768 CRT Sony to my first LCD monitor (I think it was 1920x1200?). Now THAT was an upgrade. 4k is just trivial in comparison. I for one intend to use my 1080p monitors until they die and cannot be fixed.

Not the OP but for me: I don't watch movies on my monitor so I don't care about HDR, I don't play games so I don't care about dynamic frame rate.

What I need is sweet, sweet resolution! Those ultra-wide or high-frame rate all come at the expense of DPI which is the same with the DPI from 2K monitors...

> They still don't support DisplayPort MST for use of many bigger monitors in daisy configurations.

The worst part about this is the fact that macOS does in fact support MST, but only for their 6K (and 5K on older machines, no longer requires MST since DP 1.3) display.

If that was the case, why doesn't macOS support 8k displays?

If you want an 8k display at 60Hz, your only option is to use Windows.

Microsoft is also the only company that offers a high res 3:2 display (the Surface Studio at 4500x3000 pixels), a size that is more geared towards productivity rather than streaming movies.

It's weird that if you want to get nice displays, Windows is today a better option than macOS.

I've been in the market for a new monitor for quite a while now, but haven't found a good fit, precisely because most monitors evidently kinda suck for the price. My requirements are pretty straightforward:

- 400+ nits peak brightness (my room gets really bright during the day, and my current monitor at 250 nits is practically unusable near noon)

- 4k resolution at 32 inch size (so I can use it without scaling while not taking too much desk space)

- < $500 (I refuse to pay more for a 32 inch screen than a 40 inch+ screen in a TV with much better specs)

As far as I can tell, this monitor doesn't exist (suggestions welcome!). Especially problematic is that brightness requirement, every monitor with more than 300 nits brightness I've seen has costed over $1000 for some reason.

At this point I'm probably going to just end up settling for a 40-43 inch TV instead, plenty of those that meet those requirements within the $500 budget, but the last time I used a TV as a monitor, I remember being really annoyed at having to use my remote to turn on the TV after it goes to sleep (turns off?), compared to a monitor which can get woken up by inputs from the connected computer.

Are there any other folks using TVs as monitors here? Curious if people have ideas on how to get around this issue in their own setups?

> Are there any other folks using TVs as monitors here?

YMMV, but in my experience cheapo TVs tend to not support 60Hz refresh rate. Most often it's either 24, 30 or 50, and that's absolutely a dealbreaker. It's fine for a TV, not for a computer monitor.

So if you're trying to save a buck, TV is probably not an option.

I definitely remember a time when this was something to watch out for (early 4k days), and made most TVs non-starters as computer monitors.

I don't think it's true anymore though as most TVs I've seen, even the cheap ones, can do 4k 60hz over HDMI no problem.

This one I've been eye'ing is $500 at amazon for the 43 inch version: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-43-Inch-Class-QLED-Built/dp/B...

According to rtings it does 4k at 60hz, 500+ nits peak brightness, and even has a 32 inch version (at a even lower $400 price)!

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/q60-q60a-qled

It's an absolute steal in terms of specs/dollar compared to pretty much every 4k monitor out there. I'm just hesitant to pull the trigger because of the manual wake up thing, which has really frustrated me in the past.

IIRC, if the TV supports commands via HDMI, it can be woken up from sleep without a remote. It requires extra setup on the computer to work.

I "solved" the issue of my preferred screen size not being available by going retro. It turns out that 12+ year old formerly-expensive flatscreens are a bit rubbish with brightness and power consumption, but they are better than "modern" screens for my preferences.

Hot garbage is a pricey laptop that by design won't play well with very common peripherals to force owners into buying another pricey peripheral.

There are absolutely zero reasons why an M1 shouldn't work with 1080p and above, except the usual Apple greed and lock-in.

I have a 1920x1080 144hz display and another 3440x1440 60hz display with a Mac mini m1 without issues. Im curious on what issues do you have with 1080p?

Yeah, it's really interesting to read through a thread about MacOS not playing well with third-party displays turn into a discussion about how only Apple makes good displays. That's not the point: as a customer, I prefer vendors to enable me to put together a setup that works for me. Apple seems to be intentionally failing in this regard.

I don't give a shit about 4K, colour accuracy, ultrawide, or 120+Hz refresh rates. My cheapo monitors look good enough to me, and I have no interest in dealing with the dumpster fire that is HiDPI.

Applications already know how to deal with subpixel AA, and dealing with one application with poor antialiasing is still vastly preferably to dealing with one application with broken HiDPI scaling.

If monitors could just stagnate in ~2010-2015 tech for all eternity, that'd be great. It's a solved problem, let's collectively move on to problems that actually deserve the attention.

>I don't give a shit about 4K, colour, ...

I can't go back now, once I got used to high-dpi everything else looks like garbage.

I often switch between ~6" 2560px phone screen and ~7" 1920px one, and the later clearly can display more information at the same level of readability than the former.

Same with 15" 4k hi quality laptop screen vs 40" 4k display.

So in the only metric that matters, hidpi appears to be irrelevant.

The only thing that I find to matter is the angular size of the display at a distance, that doesn't make your eyes strain. (as a dev)

Settings software stuck in 1994? Good. I want it stuck this way.

The last thing I want in my monitor is any "software". It's meant to do one thing - display pixels. IoT-ization of screens will just turn them into another "smart TV" product category with unusable UX, ads, always-on connectivity and data collection, cloud profiles (see Razer mice), and 30+ second startup times.

Maybe it'd be nice if the calibration data could be sent from the OS to be applied directly on the monitor instead of the Video Card?

And I really don't mind when producers gather (anonymized) telemetry data of my usage: maybe that'll get them to improve those damn products.

I do mind telemetry, especially on something as private as my display (or keyboard).

Realistically, why does it matter what the exact mechanism of applying calibration data is? As long as it works with the appropriate .ICM file, I'm happy. Or, (sounds crazy) just have monitors introduce a setting that treats the video input as a dumb, uncalibrated RGB stream and do the colour mapping internally in the monitor.

> Maybe it'd be nice if the calibration data could be sent from the OS to be applied directly on the monitor instead of the Video Card?

That would not be nice.

When you "calibrate" a monitor, you're really creating an output profile... a record of what signals create which colors. You can also calibrate a camera, and get an input profile, which is a record of which colors create what signals.

If you display a picture on-screen with a color profile, and your monitor has a color profile, the software translates the image from the image's color profile to the monitor's profile, and displays that on-screen. The problem here is that different pictures on screen will have different profiles, so you can't just load a profile into the monitor and do the conversion there.

For example, you might open a website, and see a bunch of pictures with sRGB profiles. And then you might open another website, and see pictures with Adobe RGB, which covers a wider gamut. The Adobe RGB profile pictures can be more colorful, if your monitor supports it, but both sets of pictures can be on-screen at the same time. Then there's the different ways you convert from one profile to another, depending on what you want (perceptual, relative colorimetric, absolute colorimetric).

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