What exactly do you gain at such resolutions on a small screen? Unless you put it right in front of you to see pixels close, you probably won't even see any difference.
The main thing you gain is crisp and legible small point text for displaying large amounts of code, terminal outputs, etc without taking up large amounts of desk space. I have both standard DPI (~110) and higher dpi (180-220) displays all sitting next to each other at my desk right now. The high res ones look drastically better and are much easier on the eyes. It is quite noticeable.
This resolution is not particularly crazy either, it is the standard DPI of all of Apple's gear for the last 6 years or so and much lower resolution than most tablets & phones. One of the bottlenecks for moving this tech beyond Apple laptops and all-in-ones (of which I am not a huge fan) has been the lack of standard external connections with enough bandwidth for these displays.
This. After reading or entering text for hours, it’s not so bad with a super sharp 4K 27” display. When I had a 1080p display of the same size, my eyes would often feel ‘tired’ at the end of a working day.
And now whenever I use my wife’s older laptop with a non-retina display, it feels like I’m looking at some 8 bit artwork!
I'd be okay with a 36-38" 4K without scaling, would love 8K at 36-38" ... I don't know why I can't get a monitor that size at anything other than 1440p. Currently using a 42" 4K, but the physical size is a bit too big. My vision isn't great, but 2x:8k:38" would be perfect imho.
The reason for desktops is rather simple. GPUs aren't there yet to support such high resolutions with high framerates at the same time. Since it's too expensive to have one monitor for each use case (one for text, one for video, one for games etc.), they provide some middle ground.
I'd take high refrersh rate with medium resolution (2.5K or something) over high resolution with low refresh rate.
So it has nothing to do with inertia, there are multiple reasons involved.
Outside of gaming, I don't buy this. You don't need an exceptionally powerful GPU to render web pages at 4K; the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.
Inertia and general lack of demand is a much better explanation. Most people either haven't experienced high-DPI monitors or just don't care that much about their PCs.
> You don't need an exceptionally powerful GPU to render web pages at 4K; the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.
idk whether the the GPU is the limiting factor, but browsing gif heavy subreddits on a 4K display brings my computer to its knees. I have a haswell i5 @ 4.3GHz and a 1080ti so I don't think my machine is underpowered.
I think one issue you are overlooking is cost of the panel itself. There's a huge difference in price between a ~200-300ppi panel that's 4.7 diagonal inches vs a laptop display (13-15 DI) and a "standard" size desktop monitor (22-27 DI). Add in the requirements of acceptable brightness and it gets expensive fast.
You're right, but I think this is mostly a chicken-and-egg problem; the displays are expensive because there isn't much demand for them, and demand is low partly because of the high cost. Once we reach a turning point (which hopefully will be accelerated by the release of the new Mac Pro monitor), high-resolution panel prices will drop pretty quickly.
For comparison, people said the same thing about IPS panels (and it was true for a long time), but these days you can get a decent IPS panel for barely more than the equivalent TN.
> the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.
Going to nitpick on this - 4K phones don't actually render at 4K. They only displayed video at 4K, and rendered at half resolution. But you're otherwise correct that you don't really need a power GPU to do basic UI work at 4K. Or rather, that even low-end GPUs these days are fairly powerful.
Gaming is a big use case for monitor makers, so they can't ignore it.
But it affects non gaming scenarios too. Static text is fine. But try scrolling that sharp text, or move something on the screen. Low refresh rate - more artifacts (motion blur, ghosting etc.). You'd see very clear difference with high refresh rate ones.
So resolution is not everything when it comes to monitors. For anything dynamic, refresh rate is more important.
I never said resolution is everything—in fact, I personally chose a high refresh rate over a 4K resolution for my recent monitor upgrade. But to say "it has nothing to do with inertia" is simply wrong and ignores the lack of demand for monitors with high resolutions/refresh rates.
I mentioned above, that GPUs are the limiting factor still, to effectively use both high refresh rate and high resolutions at the same time in all use cases. That's not inertia, rather a current limitation. That's why there is more demand for something in between still. I.e. GPUs didn't even catch up to 4K / 144 Hz yet (gaming use case is the major driver). Once they do, demand will increase.
4k @ 120hz already exists. It's expensive, but you've been able to buy it for a while now. For example the ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQ (ignore the 144hz nonsense, that's at 4:2:2 - you'll get 120hz 8bit at 4:4:4 though, and 100hz 4:4:4 10-bit HDR)
You don't read it directly, but you still glance at it to see where to stop, and you get a lot more irritation when you glance at the ghosting or over-blurred text. High refresh rate gives you a lot more smoothness.
Text is sharper, and diagrams with fine lines. PDFs using the standard Computer Modern font look much better onscreen on the retina imac in my office than the mid-2011 imac at home.
On top of people mentioning text, I'll add chat emotes to the discussion. If you use anything like Twitch chat, it's filled with custom emotes you've never seen before. I can read text without each character having an abundance of pixels. Similarly sized icons turn to blobs at that size. High DPI makes those icons very clear even when tiny. I notice a huge difference between my 1080p monitor, my phone, and retina mbp.
