In 2016 I bought a $700 40in curved 4k monitor for my job at Amazon. It's funny they probably spent over $1500 on a laptop I almost never used but did not want to pay for a decent monitor.
I really don't get the curved monitors for working. They're fine if you're playing a video game or watching a movie in the dark at home, I guess, but wouldn't want one for other uses.
They are wider than is comfortable to view at once from the short distance many office desks offer, especially if they're on a flex arm that eats up more space. They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment. They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.
The main advantage of a curved monitor is that the viewing angle is closer to 90 deg which can help with colour uniformity.
That being said, I think you are mostly thinking about the aspect ratio of ultra-wide monitors in general. It's a matter of preference, but I will take an ultra wide (>= 40in) any day over two regular 16/9 monitors. I end up having my main window in the middle 40% with two other windows on the side at 30%.
> They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment.
I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.
Ultrawides for me are awesome. Got the laptop on a riser on the left for email/teams. If you use a window manager like powertoys on windows or rectangles on mac you can get a config that utilizes the screen.
Do a decent amount of full stack work and like having vscode on the left like 80% then stack two terminals on the right.
One nice aspect of WFH is that it addresses this problem. You get a laptop and $500-1500 for hardware and many places you get it again after an interval (1-3 years).
If you are working with text a monitor with high pixel density is important. 4K 27” is good for Windows, 5K 27” is great for Macs. I think companies should provide a monitor of this calibre and a laptop powerful enough to easily drive them to technical workers. I would spend my own money on the hardware if I could use it for work. It’s like if a company said they will give you a $5000 pay raise, but you have to use a 2006 flip phone from now on. I think a lot of people would refuse the raise.
In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.
Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.
I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.
Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.
I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.
But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.
If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.
Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).
P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.
Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/
I have two Apple Studio monitors and a max-ram MacBook Pro. Work only paid for the MBP and only after I jumped through the necessary hoops, which I was happy to do. Had they not, I would have just dropped the $6k myself. One time I did drop the $6k myself and then showed my manager. Show don’t tell. He expensed it for me.
A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.
One of many questions at the interview will be asking what hardware they offer and what furniture. I had PTSD from sitting on a cheap office chair and developed massive back pain. If there isn't at least Herman Miller, anything else doesn't matter.
TBH 27" is a sweet spot for me, I feel overwhelmed with 32″ screen. 4k to get a retina like quality, which makes text more comfortable to read.
I really like my two BenQ RD280UA. They are as wide as an 27” and as tall as an 32”. For me it’s the best Aspect Ratio for desktop screens.
In 2016 I bought a $700 40in curved 4k monitor for my job at Amazon. It's funny they probably spent over $1500 on a laptop I almost never used but did not want to pay for a decent monitor.
I really don't get the curved monitors for working. They're fine if you're playing a video game or watching a movie in the dark at home, I guess, but wouldn't want one for other uses.
They are wider than is comfortable to view at once from the short distance many office desks offer, especially if they're on a flex arm that eats up more space. They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment. They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.
They pair really nicely with a column-oriented WM like Niri or PaperWM!
The main advantage of a curved monitor is that the viewing angle is closer to 90 deg which can help with colour uniformity.
That being said, I think you are mostly thinking about the aspect ratio of ultra-wide monitors in general. It's a matter of preference, but I will take an ultra wide (>= 40in) any day over two regular 16/9 monitors. I end up having my main window in the middle 40% with two other windows on the side at 30%.
> They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment.
I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.
> I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.
Offices are notoriously bad at optimizing that kind of thing.
Ultrawides for me are awesome. Got the laptop on a riser on the left for email/teams. If you use a window manager like powertoys on windows or rectangles on mac you can get a config that utilizes the screen.
Do a decent amount of full stack work and like having vscode on the left like 80% then stack two terminals on the right.
One nice aspect of WFH is that it addresses this problem. You get a laptop and $500-1500 for hardware and many places you get it again after an interval (1-3 years).
If you are working with text a monitor with high pixel density is important. 4K 27” is good for Windows, 5K 27” is great for Macs. I think companies should provide a monitor of this calibre and a laptop powerful enough to easily drive them to technical workers. I would spend my own money on the hardware if I could use it for work. It’s like if a company said they will give you a $5000 pay raise, but you have to use a 2006 flip phone from now on. I think a lot of people would refuse the raise.
In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.
Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.
I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.
Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.
I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.
Many good points, and I largely agree.
But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.
If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.
Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).
P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.
Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/
existence or absence of drama around getting the right equipment is usually a very strong indicator of technical leadership quality.
I have two Apple Studio monitors and a max-ram MacBook Pro. Work only paid for the MBP and only after I jumped through the necessary hoops, which I was happy to do. Had they not, I would have just dropped the $6k myself. One time I did drop the $6k myself and then showed my manager. Show don’t tell. He expensed it for me.
A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.
One of many questions at the interview will be asking what hardware they offer and what furniture. I had PTSD from sitting on a cheap office chair and developed massive back pain. If there isn't at least Herman Miller, anything else doesn't matter.