A Great 4K Monitor for Under $400

Damn you, Apple! You’ve ruined me for life. In November of 2013, you re-calibrated by eyeballs. Now, I own a bunch of perfectly good hardware that I can hardly stand to look at.

Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but…

It was a faithful day in late 2013 when the UPS driver dropped off my 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display. Within an hour of unboxing the machine I knew I had just started down a path of no return. My epiphany came when I turned 90 degrees to my left, diverting my gaze from my new MacBook Pro to my 2009 27” iMac. What I once thought was the most beautiful computer display I’d ever seen, now looked shoddy by comparison with pixels the size of golf balls. It was almost as if someone had smeared Vaseline on my glasses.

My previous laptop was a 2009 17” MBP. Like always, I did the BTO (Build To Order) thing from Apple’s on-line store when I bought it and, like always, I got every hardware upgrade Apple offered at the time because my MBP is my main machine. I don’t need a “Starbucks Surfer”. As an IT consultant, I need a powerful, portable workstation with as many connections as possible to suit the myriad office setups I typically encounter over the lifetime of a machine (usually 3 or 4 years). I need as much RAM as I can get to accommodate a Windows VM because well, I’m in the IT business and some chores just require Windows. I also like a discrete graphics card to drive a large monitor when I’m “docked” at my home office. If you’ve used Mac portables as long as I have then you understand the word “docked” isn’t 100% accurate (or 75% or maybe even 60…). But I’m straying a bit. More on that in a minute.

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