I appreciated your suggested experiment, so I tried it out.
My results were perhaps not exactly what you anticipated:
- My phone has 114 ppi (and wonderful battery life)
- My primary computer screen has 128 ppi (and wonderful battery life - sorry, I don't own a desktop)
As I said, I don't personally value high-density screens and this apparently affects my purchasing decisions quite strongly.
I can easily accept that we have different technological desires and I am interested in your point of view :)
I suspect you are right about the direction the desktop market should go, but it won't tempt me back to desktop (and in general, the desktop market will surely continue to shrink). I already have most everything I need from a desktop, plus portability.
Probably, we are both in minority niches - at either end of a spectrum.
Oops! I assumed you had a high-density phone to compare versus a desktop monitor. At some point, I still recommend doing the experiment. Grab someone's iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Lumia 925, whatever. And hold it up flush with a typical "HD" desktop monitor.
My phone's screen is beautiful. I want to pull at the edges of my phone's screen and stretch it to fill my entire desk.
No doubt we are both minority niches.
I've long ago acknowledged that I value the quality and size of displays more than most people I know. I spent the bulk of my income from my first high school job on a monitor.
My tastes haven't changed, but technology's pace has stalled out. Still, I make do with 30" LCDs. And anyone who sits at my workstation enjoys it once they use it. It should come as no surprise that people like things that give them more and better: better clarity, more color depth, better contrast ratio, more space to view and display information, more immersion, etc. But it's also not surprising that people don't necessarily know they would want something better and they certainly don't immediately warm to the idea of spending additional money to have better. In other words, they feel satisfied with what they have. It's good enough. As a technophile, that "good enough" complacency drives me bonkers. :)
But that's sort of the routine with popular adoption of technology. Some of us don't know we want something until it's out there and our friends and colleagues have it. I proactively want affordable large high-density displays; and I suspect a large (enough) body of consumers would reactively want the same were they to exist.
Comments
I appreciated your suggested experiment, so I tried it out.
My results were perhaps not exactly what you anticipated:
- My phone has 114 ppi (and wonderful battery life)
- My primary computer screen has 128 ppi (and wonderful battery life - sorry, I don't own a desktop)
As I said, I don't personally value high-density screens and this apparently affects my purchasing decisions quite strongly.
I can easily accept that we have different technological desires and I am interested in your point of view :)
I suspect you are right about the direction the desktop market should go, but it won't tempt me back to desktop (and in general, the desktop market will surely continue to shrink). I already have most everything I need from a desktop, plus portability.
Probably, we are both in minority niches - at either end of a spectrum.
Oops! I assumed you had a high-density phone to compare versus a desktop monitor. At some point, I still recommend doing the experiment. Grab someone's iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Lumia 925, whatever. And hold it up flush with a typical "HD" desktop monitor.
My phone's screen is beautiful. I want to pull at the edges of my phone's screen and stretch it to fill my entire desk.
No doubt we are both minority niches.
I've long ago acknowledged that I value the quality and size of displays more than most people I know. I spent the bulk of my income from my first high school job on a monitor.
My tastes haven't changed, but technology's pace has stalled out. Still, I make do with 30" LCDs. And anyone who sits at my workstation enjoys it once they use it. It should come as no surprise that people like things that give them more and better: better clarity, more color depth, better contrast ratio, more space to view and display information, more immersion, etc. But it's also not surprising that people don't necessarily know they would want something better and they certainly don't immediately warm to the idea of spending additional money to have better. In other words, they feel satisfied with what they have. It's good enough. As a technophile, that "good enough" complacency drives me bonkers. :)
But that's sort of the routine with popular adoption of technology. Some of us don't know we want something until it's out there and our friends and colleagues have it. I proactively want affordable large high-density displays; and I suspect a large (enough) body of consumers would reactively want the same were they to exist.