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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Why do we have video call meetings when people mostly just listen and the information is carried via audio?

Why do we have 4K monitors when 1920x1080 is perfectly fine for 99.999% of use cases?

If you look at the world through this lens called "serviceability" you'll think everything is a solution looking for a problem.

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> when 1920x1080 is perfectly fine for 99.999% of use cases

A lot of people here work with text all day every day and we would rather work with text that looks like it came out of a laser printer than out of a fax machine.

Of all places, HN should not be the one to casually conflate resolution and DPI!

The comments silently imply that they are talking about the same screen size, so 1920x1200 vs 4K is indeed a conversation about DPI.

I read their comment in the exact opposite way, and that your comment is exactly their point.

The conflation was that 1920x1080 is a automatically poor clarity so that's why 4k is needed (at the same size). I.e. there is no resolution that is clear or unclear in and of itself, but that's how it is discussed.

One person talks about a laptop, another talks about their big coding desktop monitor, a third talks about a TV they use. None agree how much 1080p clarity makes sense for usage because the only thing quoted is resolution. This drives the assumption everyone is talking about the same sizes and viewing distances based on the resolution, which is almost never the case (before the conversation even gets to the age old debate of how much clarity is enough).

I'm sure if you ask the original commenter, they don't mean 1080p looks great for reading books at 34" just as much as GP wouldn't mean to compare screens of different sizes either.

Of course that's what I meant. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

But who's going to use such a tiny display that would make 1080p look good?

E.g. 1080p on a 15" laptop is still sharper than 4k on a 32" desktop monitor. People do work on both modalities, they talk to the one they use, chaos ensues.

And I am immensely unhappy with my 4K@32. 4K@27 is more tolerable... really miss the 5K@27 I had (other than it was a "smart" monitor which annoyed the hell out of me).

The implicit bit is that some of us also like to work with decently sized screens.

A 24" 1080p monitor is perfectly fine for working with text of any kind. I still use mine at home, even after a decade.

As others said, resolution is not everything. DPI and panel quality matters a lot.

A good lower resolution panel is better than a lower quality larger panel. Uniformity, backlight color, color rendering quality, DPI... all of them matters.

This comment has been written on a 28" 1440p monitor.

My theory is that people complaining about text on low resolution displays are using Macs. Apple has seriously gimped the text rendering on low-dpi displays essentially just downscaling a high-resolution render of the screen rather than doing proper resolution aware text hinting.

For some reason people then blame their old displays rather than apple for this.

Makes sense.

I sometimes connect the same 24" monitor (an ASUS VZ249Q) to my M1 MacBook via USB to DP (so no intermediate electronics), and the display quality feels inferior to KDE, for example.

Same monitor allows for unlimited working for hours without eye fatigue when driven from my Linux machine. I have written countless lines of code and LaTeX documents on that panel. It rivals the comfort of my HP EliteDisplay.

Yes we are! Macs don't play well with low dpi screens. However on high dpi screens they are better than anything else.

> However on high dpi screens they are better than anything else.

As a Mac user, I find this arguable. Many of the color correction comes from the fact that Macs contain ICC profiles for tons of monitors. OTOH, if the monitor is already has accurate color rendering out of the box (e.g.: Dell UltraSharp, HP EliteDisplay), Linux (esp. KDE) has very high display quality on HiDPI monitors, too.

Unless you are using a tiny 4k monitor (>9") its not going to be laser print quality.

The comment you're replying to made use of a simile, which is a figure of speech using "like" or "as" that constructs a non-literal comparison for rhetorical effect.

A 21" 4k monitor is around the same resolution as a fax, so it was not really clear to me that it wasn't a literal comparison.

"A lot of people are in meetings all day, and we would rather look at something that looks like we're there in person than at a limited webcam."

This depends a lot on whether you really want to be in these meetings, and what you're supposed to do in them.

The first part is obvious, for the second part if you're looking at slides and docs during the whole meeting, getting a super high fidelity view of all the other participants also looking (probably) at the slides doesn't help in any way.

I mean, Google Meet has a spotlight view exactly for this reason.

"We have this amazing revolutionary tech, and there only thing we can think of is sitting in meetings all day, working with Excel sheets, and answering emails"

> and the information is carried via audio?

Because it's not. Facial expressions and body language carry gigantic amounts of information.

So many misunderstandings arise when the channel is audio-only. E.g. if a majority of people in a meeting are uneasy with something, they can see it on each others' faces, realize they're not alone, and bring it up. When it's audio-only, everyone thinks they're the only one with concerns and so maybe it's not worth interrupting what they incorrectly assume to be the general consensus over audio.

These analogies don’t compare well. Your examples don’t demonstrate an extreme tradeoff like you get with the Vision Pro.

Why do we have video calls? Because a webcam costs $1-5 to put into a laptop and bandwidth is close enough to free.

Why do we have 4K monitors? Because they only cost a small amount more than 1080p monitors and make the image sharper with not a whole lot of downsides (you can even bump them down to 1080p if you have a difficult time driving the resolution). I paid $400 for my 4K 150Hz gaming monitor so going with 1080p high refresh rate VRR would have only saved me $200 or so.

Serviceability for purpose is a spectrum and the Vision Pro is at the wrong end of it.

For more than the price of three 4K OLED 144Hz monitors, you get to don a heavy headset that messes up your hair, makes you sweaty, screws up your makeup, and you get less resolution and workspace than the monitors. Your battery lasts an hour so it’s inferior to a laptop with an external portable monitor or two. It’s actually harder to fit into a backpack than a laptop plus portable monitors since it’s not flat.

Then you have to use some complicated proprietary technology [1] to make a 3D avatar of yourself to overcome the fact that you now have a giant headset on your head and look like an idiot if you were to go on camera.

You can’t do a bunch of PC stuff on it because it’s basically running iPadOS.

This is not the same as “why are we bothering with 4K?”

[1] What will you do if Apple starts charging money for this feature?

I actually think about this a lot, and I could argue both sides of this. On the one hand, you could look at your list of examples as obvious examples of modern innovation/improvement that enrich our lives. On the other, you could take it as a fascetious list that proves the point of GP, as one other commenter apparently already has.

I often think how stupid video call meetings are. Teams video calls are one of the few things that make every computer I own, including my M1 MPB, run the fans at full tilt. I've had my phone give me overheat warnings from showing the tile board of bored faces staring blankly at me. And yeah, honestly, it feels like a solution looking for a problem. I understand that it's not, and that some people are obsessed for various reasons (some more legitimate than others) with recreating the conference room vibe, but still.

And with monitors? This is a far more "spicy" take, but I think 1280x1024 is actually fine. Even 1024x768. Now, I have a 4K monitor at home, so don't get me wrong: I like my high DPI monitor.

But I think past 1024x768, the actual productivity gains from higher resolutions begins to rapidly dwindle. 1920x1080, especially in "small" displays (under 20 inches) can look pretty visually stunning. 4K is definitely nicer, but do we really need it?

I'm not trying to get existential with this, because what do we really "need"? But I think that, objectively, computing is divided into two very broad eras. The first era, ending around the mid 2000s, was marked by year-after-year innovation where 2-4 years brought new features that solved _real problems_, as in, features that gave users new qualitative capabilities. Think 24-bit color vs 8-bit color, or 64-bit vs 32-bit (or even 32-bit vs 16-bit). Having a webcam. Having 5+ hours of battery life on a laptop, with a real backlit AMLCD display. Having more than a few gigabytes of internal storage. Having a generic peripheral bus (USB/firewire). Having PCM audio. Having 3D hardware acceleration...

I'm not prepared to vigorously defend this thesis ;-) but it seems at about 2005-ish, the PC space had reached most of these "core qualitative features". After that, everything became better and faster, quantitatively superior versions of the same thing.

And sometimes yeah, it can feel both like it's all gone to waste on ludicrously inefficient software (Teams...), and sometimes, like modern computing did become a solution in search of a problem, in order to keep selling new hardware and software.

> But I think past 1024x768, the actual productivity gains from higher resolutions begins to rapidly dwindle.

Idk man, I do lile seeing multiple windows at once. Browser, terminal, ...

My only counter point to your resolution argument is that 1440p is where I’m happy because of 2 words: real estate. Also 120hz for sure. Above that meh.

I edit video for a tech startup. High high high volume. I need 2-3 27+”1440p screens to really feel like I’ve got the desktop layout I need. I’m running an NLE (which ideally has 2 monitors on its own but I can live on 1), slack, several browser windows with HubSpot and Trello et al., system monitoring, maybe a DAW or audacity, several drives/file windows opens, a text editor for note taking, a PDF/email window with notes for an edit, terminal, the list goes on.

At home I can’t live without my 3440x1440p WS + 1440p second monitor for gaming and discord + whatever else I’ve got going. It’s ridiculous but one monitor, especially 1080p, is so confining. I had this wonderful 900p gateway I held on to until about 2 years ago. It was basically a tv screen, which was nice but just became unnecessary once I got yet another free 1080p IPS monitor from someone doing spring cleaning. I couldn’t go back. It was so cramped!

This is a bit extreme: but our livestream computer is 3 monitors plus a 4th technically: a 70” TV we use for multiview out of OBS.

I need space lol

4K monitors are better and more comfortable.

On the other hand, video calls are worse and less comfortable than audio calls.

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