Apple Cinema Display vs. the Competition [closed]

Question

I'm a professional web developer who does the majority of my work on my 15" macbook pro. As I am staring at code all day, and hunched over my laptop its starting to put a strain on my body. I do the majority of my work from the same location anyways, so I was looking into getting a desktop.

My first thought was to get an iMac. I looked at the 27". Then I looked at the specs. I realized I have a PC that has almost identical specs. I then changed my mind (mainly in the interest of saving $1700+, and decided I would best be served by just hackintoshing my PC and buying an apple cinema display.

Holy good god, just the Monitor by itself costs $1000!

It seems the majority of 27" monitors that exist are 1920 x 1080 resolution whereas the cinema display is 2560 x 1440.

I guess what I'm asking is, is the extra resolution worth the cost, for someone who stares at code all day. Or would it be more worth it to just but a 24" with 1920x1080

Is 27" absurdly big anyways? Too much space for coding?

Answer 1

Why not just buy an external monitor for your laptop? That way you don't have synchronization problems to deal with.

Oh, and you can never have enough pixels.

Answer 2

There's no such thing as "too big for coding".

That being said, your constraints are usually desk size and price. You generally want the most screen for at the best combination of these.

Dell apparently has some pretty good large monitors for a good price. MaximumPC has some reviews that I think found NEC devices were quite good as well. I'll look up some links shortly.

UPDATES more info and linky goodness: Higher resolution will mean things on the screen are generally smaller. You may want to visit an electronics store and look at pages of text on various screens and see if any of them make your eyes swim more than others.

MaximumPC's Best of the Best has a 27inch running 1080p for $300, which is amazing. They also really like a 24" Dell right now, which is also for around $300. And if money is no object, their favorite is a 30" HP for more than the Apple screen. :)

UPDATE pure opinion: I have never been wealthy enough to buy the screens I want to buy, so unfortunately (fortunately?) I must rely on the opinions of MaximumPC which I have generally found trustworthy.

Personally, I'd probably prefer one large widescreen and one smaller "square" screen, just because that's how I think and I wouldn't need any special screen management tools to get windows where I wanted them. I want multiple screens up and visible at any given time, and will generally prefer to have windows maximized in one or both of them. So I'd put my IDE in the big screen and leave SO or whatever reference site or email client or itunes or secondary interest on the smaller screen for quick reference without having to minimize the big "work" window.

That is entirely me though, and may be very difference depending on if you're a left- or right-brain, artistic or not, multi- or uni-tasking, linear or non-. I'm left- and right-brained, artistic, multi-tasking, and very, very non-linear (which makes it somewhat of a mystery to me why I find end user IT support so rewarding) and so being able to leave a focused and important thing on one screen and just leave it for discipline sake is important to me while also feeding my need to have multiple sensory inputs, referential material, etc, on that other screen for the quick fixes of info or data or whatever.