In my experience using a small monitor with X configured to use a virtual screen (i.e., the monitor just shows a small part of a much bigger desktop and you can scroll it with a mouse) is just as good as the giant monitors. I don't feel I really gained that much using 30" or 2x24" in comparison with the 15" monitor and 2000x2000 pixels virtual window I used to use in the past. Of course it's hard to argue that large monitors aren't nice, but I think the benefits for writing code are overstated.

Apple IMHO has done much better with the widescreen format than Windows has - the UI paradigm does not encourage full screen use.

Look at, say, Visual Studio - the thing is practically unusable without being fullscreened (unless you enjoy 200 pixels actual code editor). I've always felt widescreens to be a bit useless on Windows in that regard - the overfocus on fullscreen apps robs widescreen of its primary strenght: multitasking.

> What puts me off is the reflective finish.

Apple sells stick-on "de-glossing" film. The one I bought works fairly well.

I've been thinking of doing that. Was it a pain to reattach the mount?

I flipped my monitor at work to 1200 x 1920. Excellent for almost everything, except working with some dusty old collaboration tool which has problems with flexibility.

At my college job, my development machine had one vertical monitor for coding, a horizontal monitor for testing in the web browser, and another horizontal monitor for email, SQL server manager, or word processing. I miss that setup.