My ideal setup
First contemplated in May 2025.
First published May 31, 2025.
There have been no updates since.
This is a companion piece, sort of, to the page about my ideal computer:
This computer will, of course, be running my ideal OS (or, failing that, be substituted by my current computer running macOS):
In my field of view
Monitors
(NB: a “point”, in Mac-weenie parlance, is a 2×2 square of pixels on a normal Retina-class monitor. You can get this point-to-pixel ratio if you crank your text zoom in Windows or GNOME to 200%. A 4K (3840×2160) monitor, at 200% zoom, will give you an extra-crisp 1080p experience, although if your 4K monitor is any larger than 21″ or 24″ diagonally all the UI elements on your screen will look larger than you’re probably used to.)
You know that “ppi” means “pixels per inch”, right? Of course you do.
Many people say stuff like “All I need is a 1080p Thinkpad from 2010”.
I’m not one of them. I compensate for my lack of short-term memory by reducing the amount of attention I spend on alt-tabbing and scrolling.
To this end, I think I want:
- one 32″ 6K screen in the middle (Something like the Apple Pro Display XDR, which is 6016×3384 and is 218ppi)
- two ≈29.5″ 3840×2880 (4K width, 5K height) screens on each side, at about 163 ppi
Here’s my reasoning:
27″ 5K is nice; 32″ 6K ought to be nicer.
Right now, I have a 27″ 5K (so, ≈217.6ppi) screen in front of me, and one 27″ 4K (so, ≈163.2ppi) screen on the side, rotated into portrait orientation. I was surprised by how useful tall screens are, especially when reading long bits of verbiage like ChatGPT output.
However, I like how everything automatically gets bigger when I move things from my central 27″ 5K screen to my side 27″ 4K screen (my eyes are awful). On the other hand, I don’t like how narrow 1080 points is, though. I have to shrink a bunch of windows to make them narrower when I move them off to a side window. Since my “ideal” pages have all been in fantasyland…
A 4K monitor is 3840×2160.
A 5K monitor is 5120×2880.
What if we had a monitor with 4K width, but 5K height? This would be…
3840×2880 pixels.
1920×1440 points.
A 4:3 ratio.
4K, but taller. Normal people could buy one and watch 4K movies and not have play/pause and progress bars get in the way of the actual movie.
I’ve come to appreciate HDR, but I don’t have a specific nit count that I’m shooting for (1,000? 1,500?). Similarly, I’d like the monitors to all be able to detect the ambient lighting and adjust the brightness and color temperature to match (the Apple term of art for the latter feature is “True Tone”).
I kind of like wide color. I’m pretty much used to Display P3 on all my serious computers. I’d like something that’s capable of displaying all the colors in the Rec2020 colorspace, but I don’t think anything like that exists yet.
If you don’t have a feel for all the extra colors that these colorspaces provide, play around with Evil Martians’ OKLCH color picker (possibly on a MacBook Pro at an Apple Store so you can see the extra-colorful colors on a monitor right in front of your face):
It’s pretty easy to pick a vibrant green in the P3 colorspace that has a less-vibrant (darker and/or more gray) fallback.
One might as well put a decent microphone (or several) and a webcam (4K@60) and IR camera in at least the 6K one for Face ID and videoconferencing. This should extend above the monitor, not into the LCD area à la the notched MacBooks.
I think I’d like them all on monitor arms, too. Maybe.
Speakers up high
I want the desk surface mostly clear so I can make task-specific messes on it. This means that any kind of speaker anything needs to be above my wall of monitors, not below.
Since this is fantasyland, I might as well ask for a 4.1 or 5.1 surround-sound setup. Don’t these things go up to 7.1 nowadays?
The desk
The desk will be an L-shaped sit/stand desk.
Sit/stand desks seem to be all the rage these days, and I like being able to alternate between sitting and standing while using the same (non-laptop) computer.
An abnormally thin keyboard tray
When I’m sitting, I tend to have a problem where if:
- I’m seated with my arms having at least 90° of angle between my upper arms and forearms
- I’m using a normal (not low-profile) keyboard on a tray
…there’s basically no space between the keyboard tray and my thighs.
“Get smaller thighs” is definitely an option, and I’m stabbing myself on a weekly basis with a pen full of juice that does just that. However, it’ll take a few months for that whole process to work its magic, and I might gain some of that volume back in muscle maybe.
As far as I can tell, the obvious solution to this ergonomics problem is a thinner keyboard tray — one that isn’t 1″ (3cm) thick. Make it out of some unreasonably expensive material to keep the strength up even though it’s only 1cm thick, like titanium or something.
The other side of the L
This will have a solitary 27″ 4K (maybe physically larger) monitor on it capable of, at least, 120Hz. I’d play Nintendo Switch (2) games on it.
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