I have one of these. My Dad died last August (just before his 102 birthday) and he had bought himself a Pro Display XDR about 6 months before that. My brother is a PC person and I am a Mac person so I got the Pro Display.
It is an amazing display and I love it, but I would never buy one for myself. It is obviously fine for programming, but for me it really stands out as something for consuming entertainment, even though I only get 4K content. It is capable of, I think, 7K with the right computer and has 10 bit color depth. When my Dad first bought it, I used it to play Apple Arcade games on my iPad Pro - that was fairly spectacular.
EDIT: my Dad had a Black Magic video camera that I think had 8K resolution, and so he had a lot of fun with his setup.
I do visual work (graphic/UI design, photography, video editing) along with programming and there is no display with the resolution and color fidelity of the XDR at its price point. I got one shortly after release, and if it stopped working today I'd buy another one in the amount of time it takes me to click "Submit" on the Apple Store. It's just that good.
When I look at a high resolution scan of a large format negative on it, it feels like looking at it directly on a light table. It's insane. My only complaint is the local dimming, which shows its limit when you're doing fine white on black linework in a dark room. Hopefully we'll get a pro OLED display of that quality in the next decade which will solve that one issue.
The only other piece of hardware I've spent money on that comes close of giving me the same satisfaction is my Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I've used for over a decade now and I hope I will keep using until I cannot use computers altogether anymore (I have a few spares just in case).
I'm sorry for your loss, but I have to say that your post made me smile. How awesome that you and your brother got to enjoy dad at 101 being able to nerd out with video and high end displays.
The frail elderly are a very prominent group in society because their needs are so great. Robust “old-old” adults tend to blend in because they are inconspicuous and they go on about their business.
I think we’re going to see a “silver tsunami” of robust elderly persons as millennials and Gen Xers age simply because healthy lifestyle activities that had been a part of their lives.
I.e. don’t buy into Acorn Stairlift and Lifealert futures.
> I think we’re going to see a “silver tsunami” of robust elderly persons as millennials and Gen Xers age simply because healthy lifestyle activities that had been a part of their lives.
> I.e. don’t buy into Acorn Stairlift and Lifealert futures.
Trends in obesity–which is a huge driver of poor health in America–don't seem to support this hypothesis. I think the great majority of health and wellness activity in recent years has been concentrated among people at the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, which also drives perception since companies will spend a lot on advertising to attract people with money. Things in this country look very different depending on how far you are from the nearest Whole Foods/Equinox/Soulcycle/Sweetgreen.
As soon as Semaglutide et all become generic, obesity will be completely over, worldwide. It will be looked at as an awful period in history like Opium dens are now.
We can expect countries that don't give a damn about patents and IP will mass produce this and flood the global market to the same degree they have for boner-pills.
> robust elderly persons as millennials and Gen Xers age simply because healthy lifestyle activities that had been a part of their lives.
You're probably leaving out the issues around teflon, microplastics and antibiotics poisoning all food, air and water, general increased stress and anxiety about the wars, economy, job market, environment, debt and unaffordable rent/housing, the loneliness epidemic plaguing the west, which have already tanked their/our sperm count so we can't be too sure they'll/we'll see much healthier retirements if these keep piling up.
Those with solid careers in tech in developed countries yeah sure, they'll be fine and happy, most likely retired early, house and debt paid off and focused on enjoying their hobbies instead of working the 9-5 grind. The rest, not so much.
This 101 year old lived through a world war with rationing, would have been born into the great depression, saw the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the Nixon years, the oil crises and recessions, Gulf wars, 9/11...
On the healthcare front there was the proliferation of lead (in paint, toys, fuel, everything), smog from cars and coal burning, toxic fertilizers, the rise and fall of smoking, the discovery of HIV, Polio outbreaks, things like the Cuyahoga river fire (where rivers were so polluted they literally caught fire every couple decades). The mining town my family lived in would just throw the arsenic and mine tailings into the lakes because they figured it couldn't hurt them there, and that was a common thing to do at that time.
Gen X and Millennials are not the only generations who have faced adversity. It's a rough moment now for sure, but it's not unique. We shouldn't fall into baseless optimism but also don't shouldn't neglect human strength and creativity. We have new problems, and we have new tools.
> We shouldn't fall into baseless optimism but also don't shouldn't neglect human strength and creativity. We have new problems, and we have new tools.
Thank you for this comment, it helps to contextualize two moods that I have, as one who has struggled with depression (not currently, but off and on):
When I’m in a low mood it’s easy to see and dwell on the new problems and discount the efficacy of the new tools.
When I’m in good spirits it’s easy to see the new tools and (temporarily) forget about the new problems.
>This 101 year old lived through a world war with rationing, would have been born into the great depression, saw the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the Nixon years, the oil crises and recessions, Gulf wars, 9/11...
Sure, not stealing his thunder, but that's how selection bias works. Not everyone got to live to 101 despite maybe even living healthier lives. I know people in their 40's who already died of cancer. Life can always throw you a curb ball.
>Gen X and Millennials are not the only generations who have faced adversity.
As I said, it's a rough time right now, we're going through a lot. But we passed environmental reforms before, we removed lead from gas, we invented vaccines, we set standards for chemicals, we've cured a few people of HIV, there is good to find out there.
Yes, there is obesity and yes, there will be long COVID, but the health-positive initiatives (more women actually encouraged to work out; men not perceiving weightlifting as gay; marathons are a normal thing now; herpes zoster vaccines helping with long-term immunity against a probable cause of Alzheimer’s dementia; cigarette smoking as socially unacceptable behaviour) will tip the scales in favour of longevity towards making it to 100-120.
That was kind of my point. If you wanna enjoy your old age you also need to be somewhat wealthy or at least financially very table.
The old people working in the streets till they drop in China and Korea do it because they have no wealth to rest on, not because they enjoy doing that kind of work so much.
It's doable to be young and poor, but being old and poor sucks.
Wow it would have been neat to talk to the kind 102 year old person who is buying this kind of hardware. I'd love to know what he thought about the progress of technology and how he felt it had impacted society.
Apple made a big deal about using it for video production and how it could replace extremely expensive reference monitors during its introduction, if I remember correctly.
Through that lens it seems like a useful product.
For everyone else it seems like a pretty amazing monitor if money doesn’t matter. It’s most useful quality is probably being 6k, so you have tons of screen real estate.
Not to presuppose anything intimate, but if your dad was 101 buying that monitor, he was basically buying it for his kids as much as himself ;) sounds like he was into neat stuff!
Your dad was shopping for cutting edge Apple tech at 101! That's super cool. I aspire to be like him and never lose my sense of wonder about tech. Sorry for your loss, but I also am happy to hear you got to enjoy many years with him.
I have the younger brother - the regular 5K studio display and it’s leaps and bounds better than anything else I’ve ever used. 60hz max is brutal for a gamer but for programming it’s incredible.
It is an amazing display and I love it, but I would never buy one for myself. It is obviously fine for programming, but for me it really stands out as something for consuming entertainment, even though I only get 4K content. It is capable of, I think, 7K with the right computer and has 10 bit color depth. When my Dad first bought it, I used it to play Apple Arcade games on my iPad Pro - that was fairly spectacular.
EDIT: my Dad had a Black Magic video camera that I think had 8K resolution, and so he had a lot of fun with his setup.