<story><title>The state of external retina displays</title><url>https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/12/7/monitor-liss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querulous</author><text>the problem with the apple xdr display isn&amp;#x27;t just the price though. it&amp;#x27;s not a good monitor for a lot of users. it&amp;#x27;s limited to 60hz, it&amp;#x27;s response time is really poor, it suffers from really obvious blooming and bleed at high brightness and it has bad off axis color accuracy and brightness. sure, if you care deeply about color accuracy and 6k resolution it&amp;#x27;s pretty good. these aren&amp;#x27;t the only metrics on which monitors are judged though&lt;p&gt;apple does a really poor job of supporting external displays. there&amp;#x27;s virtually no good options if you want something with high refresh, good latency and reasonable pixel density and color reproduction</text></item><item><author>urthor</author><text>&amp;gt; Ridiculous Option: Apple Pro Display XDR&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll admit, a monitor that costs more than my first car is beyond affordable for 99% of the population.&lt;p&gt;But saying that, many of the people reading this are pulling truly exotic salaries right now.  After devoting untold hours to reaching the top of their profession.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say you&amp;#x27;re a professional earning $300k plus in software.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re often working 100% remote, using your monitor 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, &lt;i&gt;just for work&lt;/i&gt;.  Plus untold hours of HackerNews (strictly after 5pm of course).&lt;p&gt;I just find that&amp;#x27;s truly not an unlikely situation to be in.&lt;p&gt;Without reference to the technical merits of the Apple Display, I don&amp;#x27;t think dropping $5000 on a monitor is outlandish for any professional in the situation I&amp;#x27;ve described.&lt;p&gt;My hairdresser for example has a $4000 pair of &lt;i&gt;scissors&lt;/i&gt;.  He uses the damn things every day, and he sharpens them twice a day.&lt;p&gt;Whilst it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;essential&lt;/i&gt;, taking pride and investing in the tools of your trade is not a thing to frown upon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BoorishBears</author><text>I go into more detail below but I completely disagree with your take.&lt;p&gt;If anything for most users this thing is amazing (but expensive), and for the few users who were &amp;quot;tricked&amp;quot; into thinking this is a $5000 reference monitor it&amp;#x27;s not good...&lt;p&gt;-&lt;p&gt;Bleed is non-existent, right off the bat. In fact it doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense it&amp;#x27;d have bloom and backlight bleeding, aggressive HDR produces bloom... so the same aggressive HDR would hide BLB.&lt;p&gt;Bloom is also a complete non-issue for most users. I use this monitor primarily to consume text and casual media... I got &lt;i&gt;weeks&lt;/i&gt; at a time before remembering this monitor had HDR enabled full-time when some super thin loading spinner or something appears on a completely black background while the brightness is cranked to max but the room is kind of dark... it essentially takes a torture test to get the FALD to be problematic&lt;p&gt;Off-axis color accuracy, again, complete non-issue for most users. If I was producing Avatar 2 it might be an issue, but compared to any &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; monitor it&amp;#x27;s a complete non-issue, especially when the trade off is exactly 0 backlight bleed, which is 100 times more annoying.&lt;p&gt;For &amp;quot;most users&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s no better productivity monitor. Even a $20,000 reference monitor would be useless for us since we&amp;#x27;re not going to be able to drive or configure it...</text></comment>
<story><title>The state of external retina displays</title><url>https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/12/7/monitor-liss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querulous</author><text>the problem with the apple xdr display isn&amp;#x27;t just the price though. it&amp;#x27;s not a good monitor for a lot of users. it&amp;#x27;s limited to 60hz, it&amp;#x27;s response time is really poor, it suffers from really obvious blooming and bleed at high brightness and it has bad off axis color accuracy and brightness. sure, if you care deeply about color accuracy and 6k resolution it&amp;#x27;s pretty good. these aren&amp;#x27;t the only metrics on which monitors are judged though&lt;p&gt;apple does a really poor job of supporting external displays. there&amp;#x27;s virtually no good options if you want something with high refresh, good latency and reasonable pixel density and color reproduction</text></item><item><author>urthor</author><text>&amp;gt; Ridiculous Option: Apple Pro Display XDR&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll admit, a monitor that costs more than my first car is beyond affordable for 99% of the population.&lt;p&gt;But saying that, many of the people reading this are pulling truly exotic salaries right now.  After devoting untold hours to reaching the top of their profession.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say you&amp;#x27;re a professional earning $300k plus in software.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re often working 100% remote, using your monitor 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, &lt;i&gt;just for work&lt;/i&gt;.  Plus untold hours of HackerNews (strictly after 5pm of course).&lt;p&gt;I just find that&amp;#x27;s truly not an unlikely situation to be in.&lt;p&gt;Without reference to the technical merits of the Apple Display, I don&amp;#x27;t think dropping $5000 on a monitor is outlandish for any professional in the situation I&amp;#x27;ve described.&lt;p&gt;My hairdresser for example has a $4000 pair of &lt;i&gt;scissors&lt;/i&gt;.  He uses the damn things every day, and he sharpens them twice a day.&lt;p&gt;Whilst it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;essential&lt;/i&gt;, taking pride and investing in the tools of your trade is not a thing to frown upon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>urthor</author><text>Fair enough, I wrote the above knowing absolutely nothing about the Apple&amp;#x27;s specs.  I&amp;#x27;m just speaking in generalities.</text></comment>