I largely concur.

Dell’s monitor support policy is a bit weird. They make some of the more palatable monitors these days, but their whole “we like to pretend Macs don’t exist” vibe is just bizarre and surely self-harming. In contrast, LG actually do have half-decent Mac support (firmware updates are supported on Macs, through LG Screen Manager which is even distributed through Apple’s App Store). It’s not hard; Dell is missing out.

Re. 60 Hz, I’m not personally bothered by it – nothing I do really requires it, and even when I have source video at 120 Hz or 240 Hz, I’m never rendering at that frame rate; I’m retiming it to e.g. 60 Hz for a slow-motion effect. And for gaming, well, Apple don’t make any computers [anymore] that can really handle 60 FPS for modern games anyway, so higher refresh rates would be pretty pointless there. I’d much rather Apple develop competitive GPUs [first], even if that means sticking with 60 Hz displays.

But it does feel strange that Apple’s phones have higher refresh rates (and OLEDs!) when most of their computer displays don’t. Especially when some of those displays have monitor stands that alone cost more than some of those phones. But, that may be reflecting a larger industry reality – Apple is at least somewhat at the mercy of industry whims and demographics; maybe they can’t source a 120 Hz OLED 6k display even if they want to.

For reference, I have a Mac Studio with 128 GB of RAM and four displays (an Apple Studio Display and three Dell displays), and I’m on the latest macOS version/patch. I don’t have any specialty applications installed, so it seems it’s just a buggy window manager in the OS. This was a problem on my late 2013 Mac Pro that I was using up until a year ago, too. I’m happy with the Mac Studio, but I’m disappointed that upgrading to it and to the latest macOS didn’t solve the windowing problems I’ve been having for years.

The strangest thing I’ve seen is that when I have way too many windows open, waking the displays from sleep (the computer doesn’t sleep) causes the desktop background photo to disappear entirely, leaving a plain black desktop background, and the dock appears shrunk by about 40% and is placed about 40% up the screen from the bottom where it normally is. To get everything working properly, I have to open System Settings → Displays, click Arrange, and move one of the display screens slightly. This forces a “refresh” and everything is back to normal.

It’s not a huge problem, but it’s annoying for sure.

Thanks. I’m aware of them but indeed have not really looked at them (recently, at least – I vaguely recall using one or other of them a few years back).

I didn’t write about it in the post – because I rarely change display brightness other than to essentially turn one ‘off’ temporarily as I noted – but it’s true and very weird that Apple’s normal display brightness controls just don’t work when you have multiple monitors (meaning, they only affect the built-in display, not the others).

Tangentially, I’m aware that there are quite a lot of window management utilities, some of which might alleviate some of the multi-display problems. e.g. Mosaic (https://www.lightpillar.com/mosaic.html) has an “Auto Layout” feature which sounds promising. Unfortunately most if not all window managers [for the Mac] seem obsessed with snap-to-grid functionality, which isn’t really what I want. I’ve searched for one that simply lets me record window positions and reset them at a click, but I haven’t found anything that actually focuses on that use case.

Ah, that’s very interesting – I had not found that model before. 55″ isn’t too far off 44″… ideal working distance is about 85cm, which is a bit far but maybe not impractical. I’ll keep that display in mind, for when I replace my iMac Pro. Thanks!

(I am rather hesitant to buy a Samsung product, though, given their gross business practices… not sure how to resolve that… 😕)

It’s certainly possible – and I like to think the actual case – that Apple Silicon Macs have fewer issues here. Note how they can switch display resolutions instantly, for example, rather than after that weird pause and black out period that we just assumed was normal for decades beforehand.

I just need Apple to make a high-end Apple Silicon Mac that doesn’t feel two years old on the day it’s released. 😝

That’s interesting, hearing about the experience on Windows & Linux. I don’t recall ever using multiple monitors with them (I have used and still use Linux quite a bit, but in a headless manner… and Windows is only very rarely inside VMWare Fusion).

I’m not sure it’s as untenable (in principle) as you suggest – most of the macOS problems I’ve seen are design flaws and bugs, which in principle can be fixed. Then again, the fact that these problems have persisted for decades does empirically suggest you’re right.

I can certainly believe that the dynamic display case – e.g. a laptop that’s only sometimes connected to a desk display – might conceivably be intractable. I didn’t even touch on that in my post here, but in the past some of my dallies into the multi-display world have been the typical office setup of a laptop and Thunderbolt display(s). I didn’t enjoy that either.

I would love to consider the Vision Pro, but it’s just not there yet, technologically. I wrote about that previously: https://wadetregaskis.com/apple-vision-pro-first-impressions/

I do turn my iMac off when I’m done using it, yes. It uses a lot of power while “asleep”, which is wasteful (I turn power off at the wall for my entire desk, when I’m not there – between all the various accessory devices and external drives etc, it’s something like 50W even before I push the iMac’s power button).

I also find that frequent reboots helps hide other problems that otherwise reveal themselves on a workhorse machine that runs for an extended period. So I’m inclined to do them anyway.

Tangentially, until only about a year ago, my iMac Pro wouldn’t go to sleep at all. It would immediately wake itself up, and then just sit there at full power with the screen off, indefinitely. I spent a lot of time debugging this years ago, ruling out any connected Thunderbolt and USB devices, etc. It seems like it was a software problem, presumably fixed in some recentish software update. Just one of many, many long-standing flaws with the iMac Pro.

Once I discovered it is now able to sleep, I have started using that function occasionally, but only where I know I’ll be back shortly – e.g. across a lunch break. It’s just too wasteful (of electricity) otherwise.

Exactly. I routinely clock uptimes greater than 30 days.

Windows sucks at multiple displays (ok, even with one display only)
App position is … always random. Some applications cannot split windows on separate screens and let’s avoid the topic if the two monitor have different scaling resolution.
Moreover, it does not remember screen resolution and relative positions if you change monitor configuration.
But it can’t handle virtual desktop. There is the functionality, but it simple works very very very badly, so it is basically useless and unusable.

Linux is a little better, but not too much.
It identifies monitors and when you connect some specific monitors, it remembers the position, resolution and scaling for that particular configuration. That’s very good. But
You can’t use different scaling because some programs (also DE) read scaling only at some point of their life and when you drag windows across monitors you see fireworks.
But you can overlap monitors (it’s useful only in a very few cases, but it’s useful)

About de’s toolbars, that’s another pain in the neck. I also like some widgets on the left, but it saves the position as absolute in the whole destop area (that covers all the monitors), so if a toolbar is at 0;100 coordinates, and the first monitor starts at 0;500 … you can imagine what happens.

So the problem is not Mac/Linux/Windows, it’s the concept itself. It was not designed at the beginning, it was developed as a bunch of patches added here and there from time to time, users now have some expectations and it’s very hard to change them.
I personally don’t like Apple, but if even Apple can’t force their user to follow a path … the problem is not Apple. The problem is way lower.

I fully shut down a mac only for software updates, the rest of the time, it just goes into sleep mode, and when it wakes, windows are where I left them.