LOL!
Just watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-UWzxlmL_E
Yeah, yeah. Live for a few years 100% in the Android and Windows ecosystem and let’s discuss this again.
To be fair: retro compatibility is better under Windows to be sure, but you can never be sure that new feature that’s introduced in those ecosystems won’t be axed in six months. When Apple introduces something, they’re committed to making it work on the long run.
I want to chime in on this because Apple’s reluctance to make this product drive me insane.
Apple is the only company I’m aware of at this point that produces 5K displays at 27". Once you get used to it, there’s no going back. 4K at 27" is not the same DPI, and macOS looks weird running at that resolution. UI elements are not scaled properly.
Critically, if you have a 27" iMac and want a matching display, your only option is the LG Ultrafine 5k. The huge 6K screen is way bigger.
If you have one of the new 24" 4.5K iMacs, the LG Ultrafine 4K at 24" is again mismatched. And this is Apple’s recommended monitor accessory for that machine. The state of things is not great.
Finally, colours vary wildly from one screen to another. Apple has their own colour profile for their Macs, and Dell’s (to use an example) looks very different. Same with BenQ and same with HP. They all look a little weird beside an existing Apple monitor, and none of them (including the LGs) have quality that matches the old Thunderbolt / Cinema Display lineup.
Apple makes computers designed to run at a certain DPI, and the fact that the only existing standalone monitor they sell designed to run at that DPI starts at $5k USD without a stand is an embarrassing hole in the lineup. None of this matters to you unless you want colour-matching and resolution-matching peripherals, or the “correct” DPI as advertised by Apple. But most Apple people (myself included) care a lot about these details.
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I’m an Android user for about 10 years (started with an LG Optimus 2X, which was horrible tbh). Last couple of years I’m using Samsung Galaxies. They just work. Just like iPhones I presume.
The fact that colors don’t match between Apple displays and those of other brands, doesn’t mean the other ones are bad (or of inferior quality).
No, but it does mean that it’s not what you want if you’re used to (or prefer) Apple’s colours. The build quality on every monitor I’ve ever owned (outside of the old Thunderbolt Display) has been incredibly disappointing, though. Is that true for every monitor? Nope. But if Apple was going to make a standalone monitor, the build quality would probably be pretty good.
The point is, people want Apple to make a 5k monitor for a variety of very acceptable reasons. It’s not because every other monitor is terrible; it’s because no other monitor has the feature set they want.
Edit to add: by build quality I mean materials, wobble factors, and overall sturdiness. Your typical plastic monitor frame is nowhere near as “nice” as the aluminum iMac frames.
They just work, if you take into account all the ideas Samsung throws at the wall and discontinues four months later, the Wiz interface and the fact that Android updates happen six months to a year later if at all.
Samsung had a terrific platform with the Note tablets but with lack of direction, they left them to languish and finally abandoned them for a long while. I switched to the iPad pros and the Apple ecosystem because I knew the Pencil was there to stay, that Apple was committed to it, and I needed that as my workflow relies heavily on handwritten notes.
Been burned too much by the great ideas Samsung never followed up with. In five years, Apple has never let me down nearly to the same extent.
Fair enough. Anything significantly cheaper is likely to be inferior.
Forgive my ignorance here, but as somebody who has only ever owned one Mac with a display (2009 Macbook) I’m not sure what you’re driving at.
Doesn’t everything just scale slightly bigger or smaller? Isn’t it all just pixels, at the end of the day? Or do the different elements scale differently for some reason?
I’m not ripping on Windows 11. But I don’t think “1 + 1 = 11” fosters the most confidence when you’re pitching software.
If you put a “1” and a “1” next to each other, what does it look like? 
Technically, if we’re pitching software, at the most basic level 1 + 1 = 10.
Separate but related note: It’s also fun to point out to people that you can count to 1023 using only your hands. 
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The available combinations of performance, available DPI (element size) and sharpness of macOS scaling vary depending on the external display. It’s complicated. This page and its links are worth reading top to bottom.
Best link from that page:
Thanks for the links. Interesting stuff. 
And I think I see the point they’re making, although I don’t personally care about some of it.
I always insist on using my panels at their native resolution, or a direct-multiple (I’ll use 4k at 1920x1080, for instance). Scaled resolutions generally suck.
But I care very little about what Apple has decided the real-world size of the elements needs to be. With my eyes getting older, I’m fine if the menu bar, targets, etc. all get bigger as the panel size increases. For me it’s mostly about the overall size, not whether my Macbook and my Mac Mini are matchy-matchy. 
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This is fair. In your case (and presumably the person who was debating the merits of an Apple display with me), it’s not an important metric. Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for the minority of people (like me), there are lots of monitors that will cater to whatever other specifics you have, and very few that will work for me.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Yup - I understand that there are people that are picky. And absolutely nothing against those people. I just keep hearing about what a huge and crucial issue this stuff supposedly is, and was trying to understand the gist of the argument. 
FWIW, if there were a 27" 4K Apple display at any point I’d probably own it. I like Apple hardware. And I think it’s borderline silly that Apple doesn’t just make a 27" monitor / hub type thing like they did a decade or so ago. I wouldn’t care what the resolution was, but at this point 5K is what makes sense. I would imagine there are a significant number of people that would shell out for one.
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Having used both 4K/5K in a 27" size it does make a significant difference to how many interface elements I can fit on my screen while sticking to ‘default’ resolutions. But it’s also about how close to 1:1 I can display photos when editing, or for photos larger than the screen, how much of it I can display at 1:1.
Which brings me to a curious thought. Why isn’t a 4K display just called an 8 megapixel display? Oh, I know the answer, but it would be more useful to me to know that an 8 megapixel display will comfortably display my 6 megapixel images but not even close to my 24 megapixel images.
Ohhh, how about a 218ppi (iMac 5K resolution) 24 megapixel display? Now THAT would be awesome! (And, if sized at a 2:3 ratio like my camera sensor, about 33 inches on the diagonal.
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Microsoft engages in coercive user experience antipatterns to get people to use its features. Some might categorize these antipatterns as bullying and microaggression .
For example, Office used to have a way to copy the path of a document on a network to paste into an email, very handy for sending a link to a shared document rather than emailing a copy. Bat that was too useful, so they had to find ways to spoil it. Step 1 software update, make the text uncopyable with the mouse and provide a copy button. Step 2, once the herd get used to that, make the copy button deliver a link that contains the instruction to open the document in the lame web version of the Office app rather than the proper hard disk version. (Step 2a, make an extra click on the File tab to even access this feature.) Because for some reason, we really want people using the web versions of our apps. I guess this is another Pied Piper antipattern - kidnap the data, charge a ransom to access it.
On Windows, they used to put “Microsoft” in the name of every Office app - “our name is more important than your life, so we are willing to waste a second of your life every time you look for our app in your task bar.” Thankfully this stopped but people remember pain.
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Bullying is how I see it - maybe that comes from reading the Antipatterns book back in the day, and looking out for Antipatterns from then on.
Within an Office document, selecting File used to show the document Info, but that has been moved to an Info tab, an extra click. There you see the document path, no longer directly selectable as it once was. There’s a copy path button which used to copy the path and filename. Now, for a document on SharePoint, the button appends ?web=1 to the filename in the copy paste buffer, forcing the document to open in the web app instead of the regular app.
As well as the bullying, there’s the ignoring of intractable bugs for years. The handy Send to OneNote buttons in Outlook - when clicked, respond with “OneNote must set itself up first” so you have to close and reopen OneNote to use the feature.
A good thing from Windows? The recent provision of a multi copy paste buffer with Windows V instead of Control V. Except, with graphic objects, it may paste a bitmap of the graphic whereas Control V would paste the graphic. Sigh.
If I had to sum up my main issues with Apple, it’s:
- hiding metadata (which people complain is “dumbing down”)
- taking a use case based view of user activity which can be limiting, because Apple does not know what everybody wants to do with their data;
- taking an app-centric view of the world instead of a data-centric view.
Example of the latter: in my Contacts app I can store addresses for people. In my Maps app I can store “bookmarks.” Why doesn’t Maps show a dot for each of my contacts? It’s now possible to convert a contact to a favorite and display it on the map, but I shouldn’t have to do this one at a time, it should be a layer. I generally know where my friends live, but I like to navigate when I drive in case of delays, missed turns etc. Also, I may know how to get from my home to point A and my home to point B, but if I’m at point A, I may not know the best route to point B. I’d like to just click a dot on the map to go there rather than looking up the contact’s address by name.
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I don’t use SharePoint from a web page very often. In this case the feature is inside an app. The way it worked changed multiple times, for the worse every time. I call this bullying because when I try to imagine what their goal here is, it’s trying to herd users into using the web apps. Preventing you from copying text that you used to be able to copy, providing a new non-standard way of copying it and then adding extra text to what you copied?
Many of us here are both Windows and Mac users, some of us have used both platforms for decades, since their inception. Microsoft saved Apple in 1997. If I see evidence of a user-bullying antipattern in Microsoft’s current behavior, that’s my long-term perspective. Apple has other antipatterns, also frustrating, but right now I don’t call any of them bullying.