The Monitor is the Revolution
I walk around in a state of permanent techno jones. The smallest speed bump leaves me salivating and if G5s ever hit 3.0 GHz or introduce dual core chips I might find myself in some sort of credit card melting seizure. My fervent hope with each new purchase is a completely new computing experience, something that feels revolutionary. It is similar to a golfer trying to buy a golf swing by investing in new clubs every year instead of bothering to take a lesson. Thus far no computer I’ve purchased has given me that truly awe-inspiring computer experience I’ve been craving. Which isn’t really surprising, my upgrades tend to be fairly incremental so it isn’t as if I’m going from a Quadra 660 AV to a dual 2.7GHz G5 Tower.
Recently I did have the revolutionary computing experience I’ve been craving oh these many years. I had some cash saved up from various projects and decided to blow it on a monitor. Monitors have been consistently low on my list of things to improve because they don’t make your computer any faster, seemingly don’t increase functionality and the purchase eats into the money earmarked for the next computer. I threw all previous reasoning to the wind and decided to go hog wild and splurge on a 20-inch Apple display. When I finally got the thing (the wait seemed interminable) I hooked it up and was blown away.
I wasn’t blown away by the color fidelity or the crispness of the image (well, actually I was but only because my old monitor had become a bit fuzzy) I was shocked by the sheer space of the screen. Screen real estate may not seem like a big deal to casual users (people like me) on the surface but it makes a huge difference in day-to-day use. This surprised me for several reasons.
The first reason is just how much better the net seemed on the larger screen. Most pages are optimized for an 800x600 resolution that was easily achieved on my previous monitor. With the new monitor I was able to, with no difficulty, have two browser windows open side by side and miss nothing. This ability may seem superfluous to some (as it did to me when I had 17” monitor) but it is of unquestionable usefulness when you’re watching a movie or playing a flash game in one window while simultaneously reading, say Apple Matters, in separate browser window.
While initially I didn’t think the monitor was anything but a possibly ill-advised indulgence when I purchased it I noted that it improved my workflow considerably. I write quite a bit and (this piece excepted) generally try to include a fair amount of research when committing my thoughts to pixels. With my previous monitor if I found some salient point on the web that I wanted to include in a column I would find myself flopping betwixt Word and Safari like the goldfish in that annoying video for Epic. Suddenly that hassle was gone. I could devote 50% of screen real estate to writing and 50% to research. That unexpected change made life much easier.
Surprisingly my favorite program, iMovie, benefited not at all. The program is fairly well self contained the version I use doesn’t support drag and drop. Which was a bit of a shock, when doing anything with video you always assume bigger is infinitely better. Final Cut Express is a completely different case, the extra screen space coupled with that program made using FCE much more enjoyable to use.
Seemingly no upgrade is without annoyances. When I received a G5 I missed the interrupt switch on my upgraded Sawtooth and the monitor provided me with an annoyance I didn’t even realize existed. Imagine you’re working diligently on an article and doing a bit of research on a web page. If you take a moment to scroll the web page you can’t simply start typing the article again. You’d think the OS would remember where the cursor was last used and let you simply start typing but the process instead requires another click (or key combo) to reactivate Word. A minor complaint I suppose but one that should be addressed with ever increasing monitor size.
In the end I finally found that revolutionary computer experience I’ve been craving for so long. Not in a faster chip or dual layer burner but with a bigger monitor. The amount of difference a monitor can make is astonishing to me and I suspect others with similar upgrade paths were surprised just how much difference a larger screen makes. At this point I had hoped that my incessant cravings for new technology would finally be fully sated and to some extent they are. I no longer crave a top of line G5, I realize I couldn’t really take advantage of such a machine. On the other hand any idiot can take advantage of a larger screen so I spend my waking time yearning for the thirty-inch model.
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Screen real estate has always been a focal point in my work… I’m either designing in Adobe and Macromedia, or working on music in Logic Pro (which has a multitude of recording/VST windows). For my primary iBook G4, 1024x768 is terribly cramped. I actually considered at one point ditching Apple for a 1920x1200 Sony Vaio A690 17” laptop. It just makes all the difference in the world, and that’s why I’ve been frequently disappointed at Apple’s lack of expansion on their powerbook line (1440x900 for the 17”, 1280x768 for the 15). Supposedly in “The Year of HD”, Apple is rumored to have higher resolutions, but as all things we’ll have to wait and see. I do use virtual desktop managers, but it’s not the same. There’s something blissful to be found in seeing all your information at once.
Chris, I had this epiphany the day I splurged and came home with a shiny new 450MHz Cube, and a 22-inch Cinema Display. It, quite literally, changed my life. Since then, I have been the world’s most eager proponant of “more screen real estate is never enough.” I presently use both 30-inch and 23-inch ACD’s on my own Powermac. And, I own perhaps the only company in existence where it is expected that all employees (from clerical to shipping, to… everybody) has multiple, large displays on their desks.
I have seen the workflow improvement from having gazillions of pixels. So, it blows my mind when I visit another business and see rooms full of people squinting down at 15-inch displays on their desks, trying to earn income for the company. Don’t business owners and managers have a clue about the value of providing workers with great tools?
So, welcome to the “I Get It” club, insofar as the joys of having lots of screen space. Watch yourself (and your credit card), or, you’ll end up a member of the “I Want The Most And Biggest Possible” display-buying club, as well.
Ah… the pleasures of a 30-inch Cinema Display HD…
Good article. Very salient info. My last job gave us 21” CRTs to do our work and it helped. I am now with a new company that hasn’t realized that 17” CRT monitors are entirely too small to be productive.
Chris, I had a similar experience when I added an additional monitor to my PowerBook rig,which I now use as my main CPU (holding out for those dual-cores <g>). While the 17” PB screen looks pretty nice, it’s not like having a 19 or 20” - but after I tossed in a cheap COSTCO $300 17” on the side, life became much easier.
I would still prefere to have a giant cinema display, but for now, I like to keep my iChat and other misc. windows open on the side monitor, while my PB screen focuses on the task at hand. When coding, I love having my paste templates and other ref. docs on the side monitor, not to mention using it for my ProTools mix window while I tweak tracks on the main LCD.
I’m not sure how I managed all these years without 2 displays (or a single giant one), but I doubt I’ll ever go back to anything smaller than a 20” or so.
My brother just got the Dell 24” display and it’s fantastical. You almost don’t know what to do with that much space.
And the 30” is, of course, obscene. I look at that thing in the Apple store like I’m staring at a naked woman.
I have to say, though, that there is no more clear cut example of the “Apple tax” than the Apple monitors. The Apple 23” is almost $1000 more than the Dell 24” at virtually the exact same specs. While I can forgive the price of the 30” since there is no competing 30” monitor, there is simply no excuse for the price on the 23” and the 20” other than taking advantage of the loyal users they know will pay that premium.
UPDATE: I should note that at the time, the Apple 23” was still $1799 and my brother got his Dell 24” directly from Dell for $800.
The Apple display has since dropped to $1499, which is a $700 difference. You can still get the Dell for $800 if you call them directly, but the list price is $1199, a $300 difference.
In any case, it’s still a premium on the Apple display for not quite as large a screen. And the Dell has vertical and swivel adjustments, not just tilt.
Well Beeblebrox that is a pretty big price difference, though I don’t really understand what’s hte deal is with having the call direct price so much lower than the listed price (which on the net looks like a special sale price to me).
When I was monitor shopping I headed to the compusa because a monitor is one thing I am not willing to buy sight unseen, a computer sure, but not a monitor. I was not convinced that an appple monitor was the way to go but they had the best picture and were price competitive, actually cheaper than similarly sized monitors. Oh and when I say “best picture” I don’t mean they were the only ones with a good image just that the images wer4e among the best as judged by my subjective eyes. I note that that is still the case:
http://www.compusa.com/products/products.asp?N=200049+502399&Ne=502396
I whole heartedly agree with you here… on my Windows box, I still only run a 32-bit Athlon, very slow by todays comparison with the advent of cheap AMD 64-bit chips.
But since I got my 15” Powerbook, i realised that the extra screen real-estate provided by the widescreen is a complete boon and makes multi-tasking even easier and decided to stop upgrading my PC with faster components and instead invest in a 17” Widescreen monitor.
It is invaluable and I and now hot on your heels having comtemplated upgrading to an even bigger screen so some time, the Apple 20”.
What is going to be even sweeter is that I will be buying when I am in HK, and the prices there (after haggling ofcourse) are phenomenal compared to the UK. A saving of over £150 is not uncommon and I expect to pay less than £400, a saving of over £150.
I will be disappointed with anything less as I saved a massive 100% on price when I bought my PB new a couple of years ago.
Paying at least $300 more (and up to $700) to Apple for a smaller monitor is a lot to ask even if you can’t check out the Dell in a store. There are online reviews. Plus, the Dell monitor would have to be WAY inferior for the Apple monitor to be worth the price difference, but Dell makes good products and, now having seen it, the monitor is just as good.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Apple Cinema displays. That 30” is outrageously awesome. I just really hate the “Apple tax.”
If you hold down command while dragging Safari’s scroll bar, your Word document will not lose its focus. It would be nice, however, if there was a better way to manage the focus of visible apps and windows. I often get mixed up with my two displays. I might be looking at one app, and, thinking that it is the active app I’ll hit Command+Q to close it, only to be horrified moments later when I learn that I’ve closed an app which is on the other display and had unsaved data, eek! To avoid this I installed “Focus,” which represents the currently active application with a big, friendly icon.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19017
Thanks for the tip Meh, though I concur there should be a better way.
I went full on and bought a 20” iMac as I was told this was the same display as the 20” Apple Display. I love it when looking at my photo collections or editing movies, but I cant figure out why text is now horribly tiny. As I was coming from a 21” SGI CRT, I wasnt prepared for the oddities of being stuck with one real resolution setting. I thought Tiger was going to have some sort of resolution independent application scaling, but I guess I’ll be waiting a little longer…
Well, I’ve got a different tip for switching programs. Though, I don’t mind the focus not automatically switching back and prefer it not to. But that might be because I like to use the keyboard to tab through parts of window sometimes and don’t want to have to convince the operating system that I really do want the focus in the window I’ve click into. So, I like the Command-click ability instead of the OS assuming I want to type in some other application.
As stated before, Command-click-drag works with the scrollbar in a window of another app without bringing that window or app forward. And actually, Command-mouse click is quite broad.
For instance, Command-click-drag the title bar of another window and you move it without bringing it forward. However, don’t Command-click on the title itself because that will give you a menu of the file path or browser history or something else relevant.
Command-click a tab in a Safari window that isn’t active and the window will switch to the tab without bringing the window forward (read: no loss of focus). Try to Command-click different things and see what else you can do.
As for the alternatives I mentioned, since your hands are on the keyboard (you said you want to start typing someplace) these might help. One is the obvious Command-Tab. If you simply tap the Tab key instead of holding it down then you will simply be taken back to the previous app you were using. Very useful for quickly switching back and forth between two apps.
Also consider Command-` and Command-~ (same key, use shift). That usually cycles you through the windows in the current app, backward and forward.
Oh, and one more thing, but a little off topic. You can select text in an unfocused window simply by using Command-click-drag. That will highlight the text in gray (since the window doesn’t have the focus). Try Command-double click for selecting, too. Any selection in an unfocused window can simply be Command-click-dragged and dropped any place, even to the desktop as a textclipping. Oh, and of course, whenever click-dragging, it helps to pause at least a fraction of a second so the computer will know you want to move the selected text or stuff instead of creating a new selection.
I find the Command-click actions quite useful since I don’t have as much screen real estate. Being able to scroll a window in the back and then select text and then drag the text to the window I’m currently typing in (or even to different one) is quite a click saver and feels much cleaner without swapping windows around. There’s really a lot of different possibilities which is great since I’ve found lots of different circumstances, too.
Just experiment and play, play, play.
You can get point-to-focus if you purchase (or try out) CodeTek’s virtual desktop pro - NB thunderbird and firefox won’t work with it, but everything else seems good.
As a +10 year Solaris user, point-to-focus is just something I can’t do without on a big screen. Much more efficient.
I wholeheartedly agree on a couple of things here. First, I too used to be only interested in how much more power I could get out of my next (please bare with me here) AMD Athlon CPU, at the expense of using a horribly faded and fuzzy old Compaq 15” CRT. I used that poor thing for 5 straight years, starting with a 700MHz Athlon Thunderbird and finally ending with an Athlon 64 3500+. It was only when it up and died on me that I went out and bought a shiny new 20” Widescreen Sony LCD and realized just what I was missing.
However, I have to take just a little bit of issue here… I *DID* have a computer epiphany. While visiting San Francisco late last year I stumbled upon the Apple Store downtown. I went in somewhat reluctantly as I had never been an Apple fan (C64 rules!) and had largely ignored them for the past 20+ years. A month later, after returning home to Seattle, I bought an iBook G4 and just a week ago I bought a new iMac G5 2GHz. This, for me at least, is the computer “zen” experience I feel you’re trying to describe, I have this experience every single day now and I’m loving every last second of it - my PC on the other hand, well, lets just say those screensavers look real nice on my Sony LCD thankfully because it doesn’t get used much anymore.
And finally, I have to agree, I’m constantly finding myself trying to justify splurging on a 30” Apple Cinema display - but I’ve decided to wait for that dual 3GHz PowerMac to go along with it.