1. I believe a substantial part of the problem is that the desktop manufacturers have lost all will to even attempt to market innovative desktop technology. If immersion is out of fashion, that's a matter of fashion having been steered by better marketing.
I have three 30" displays on my desktop. When I want to create and consume at home, I strongly prefer my desktop computer to my tablets and my cell phone. I can relax in my chair with a full-screen video on one monitor, my social media on another, and something I am composing (words, code, whatever) in the center.
I would pay substantial money to replace all three of these monitors with one that spanned the same width (~6 feet), was 50% taller (~3 feet), with slightly higher pixel density, and was of course seamless. As someone else said, ideally it would be slightly concave so that from my vantage point, it doesn't appear convex.
The manufacturers are as much to blame for our culture's embrace of "good enough" on the desktop as consumers' passivity. I personally am anything but passive about my desktop demands; but you're correct, many are. Still, I feel those passive consumers could be stirred to an active, interested, or perhaps even high-demand state if desktop technology moved forward.
If Microsoft, HP, Dell, Lenovo, the whole gamut, are concerned about desktop sales, they should wake up and give us a reason to buy a new desktop PC.
2. That's a matter of preference or tolerance of today's mediocrity. As I've ranted elsewhere, many/most people are also comfortable with MPEG artifacts and lossy compression. I long for the day where bandwidth and capacity allow us to discard lossy compression to a dustbin.
My eyesight isn't what it used to be now that I'm much older. But I still can clearly see the shocking difference in clarity when I hold an OLED high-definition phone flat to my 30" LCD monitor. It's night and day. The phone's display makes my 30" LCDs look like ancient history. Sad thing is: they're quite new.
Try it. Sit 3 feet from your desktop monitor, as I am, and hold your phone up flush with your monitor. Which looks better?
Imagine if your desktop monitor looked that good. But also filled your field of view. Maybe that's not for you, but it's for me, and I would pay dearly for it.
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.
I have three 30" displays on my desktop. When I want to create and consume at home, I strongly prefer my desktop computer to my tablets and my cell phone. I can relax in my chair with a full-screen video on one monitor, my social media on another, and something I am composing (words, code, whatever) in the center.
I would pay substantial money to replace all three of these monitors with one that spanned the same width (~6 feet), was 50% taller (~3 feet), with slightly higher pixel density, and was of course seamless. As someone else said, ideally it would be slightly concave so that from my vantage point, it doesn't appear convex.
The manufacturers are as much to blame for our culture's embrace of "good enough" on the desktop as consumers' passivity. I personally am anything but passive about my desktop demands; but you're correct, many are. Still, I feel those passive consumers could be stirred to an active, interested, or perhaps even high-demand state if desktop technology moved forward.
If Microsoft, HP, Dell, Lenovo, the whole gamut, are concerned about desktop sales, they should wake up and give us a reason to buy a new desktop PC.
2. That's a matter of preference or tolerance of today's mediocrity. As I've ranted elsewhere, many/most people are also comfortable with MPEG artifacts and lossy compression. I long for the day where bandwidth and capacity allow us to discard lossy compression to a dustbin.
My eyesight isn't what it used to be now that I'm much older. But I still can clearly see the shocking difference in clarity when I hold an OLED high-definition phone flat to my 30" LCD monitor. It's night and day. The phone's display makes my 30" LCDs look like ancient history. Sad thing is: they're quite new.
Try it. Sit 3 feet from your desktop monitor, as I am, and hold your phone up flush with your monitor. Which looks better?
Imagine if your desktop monitor looked that good. But also filled your field of view. Maybe that's not for you, but it's for me, and I would pay dearly for it.