Screen Size and Resolution: What Is Too Much? How Much Is Too Little?

On November 18, 2003, Apple took the iMac to a new level with the 20" iMac G4. The original G3 iMacs had used 15" displays that supported 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768 resolutions, and the original iMac G4 also had a 15" 1024 x 768 display (the same resolution found in many G3 PowerBooks and all white iBooks). In July 2002, Apple added a 17" iMac with 1440 x 900 resolution, and when display prices dropped enough to make a 20" iMac feasible, the biggest G4 iMac was introduced with a 1680 x 1050 resolution.

Dan Knight (Mac Musings): They don't even make iMacs that small any longer, but even the 15" iMacs were a huge step forward from the earliest Macs. Longtime Mac users may remember the 9" 512 x 342 pixel display on the original Macintosh, the Mac Plus, and the Classic II. With the introduction of the Mac II in 1987, the Mac got its first 640 x 480 displays, joined by a 15" vertical 640 x 870 Portrait Display and 21" 1152 x 870 Two-Page Display, along with matching video cards, in 1989.

As someone who worked in publishing, these were wonderful - our editors had full-page displays to use when editing manuscripts, and we designers had the monstrous two-page displays so we could view a spread while doing page layout in Quark XPress (then at version 3.x) or FrameMaker (also at version 3 when I started using it).

At the time, I had a Mac Plus at home, and it was a bear just writing papers on its small screen, let alone multitasking with such a tiny display. Moving to a Centris 610 and 640 x 480 display helped, but those big displays at work had spoiled me. When I finally moved to PowerPC at home with a SuperMac J700, I picked up a 17" Nokia display, which was never a very reliable piece of hardware. I later replaced it with a 19" ViewSonic Optiquest monitor that was tack sharp at the same 1152 x 870 as Apple's Two-Page Display I had once used at work. (The Optiquest also supported 1280 x 1024, which was a bit fuzzy but usable.)

Of course, by then we had 20" Sony monitors running at 1280 x 960 at work, but the whole point is that each step up in display resolution made it that much easier to multitask on the Mac. With the Mac Plus, you really couldn't have side-by-side documents. With an 800 x 600 display, that still wasn't practical, but you could have partially overlapping ones, which makes switching between them easier. At 1024 x 768, things got better, and 1280 x 1024 (the resolution of my Dell flat panel display) seemed nearly perfect until I found a 22" 1680 x 1050 Apple Cinema Display for $75 a couple years ago. This was living! I could have a browser window on one side of the screen and be working in Claris Home Page, KompoZer, or, more recently, BlueGriffon on the other side. (I rarely use full-screen windows except for videos.)

As I said in Living Large in August 1998, "A big screen will absolutely spoil you." It's hard to go back to a lower resolution display once you've become used to a bigger one. I remember that it took some adjustment going from the 1280 x 1024 ViewSonic to the 1152 x 768 display on the original PowerBook G4. I prepared for it by scaling the monitor back to 1152 x 870 until the TiBook arrived. I don't think I could ever go back to something that small, and even the 1280 x 800 of the 13" MacBook and MacBook Pro would feel restrictive compared to my desktop Macs. For me, a 15" 1440 x 900 display would probably make for the ideal laptop, although the pre-Unibody 17" MacBook Pros with their 1680 x 1050 displays would be even nicer.

I have fiddled with 30" displays and 27" iMacs at the Apple Store, and I have to say that they just seem way too large for me. That's a long ways to drag an item to the Trash or the Dock, and the menu bar can be so far from where you're working in a document. I don't see myself ever going that far. That said, I have to admit that the few times I've hooked up the Mac mini to the 42" HD TV, running at 1440 x 900 resolution, it's been very cool. I think the issue is screen resolution more than screen size.

Then again, you can go too far in the resolution direction, and I find the very high resolution 128-135 pixels per inch (PPI) MacBook Air displays difficult to read. It's nice to have all those pixels, but then you have to zoom your text to read it. The 110 PPI of the 15" MacBook Pro is a bit beyond my comfort zone, but something in the 96-100 PPI range is just fine for my aging eyes.

Steve Watkins (The Practical Mac): When I saw the 11" MacBook Air, it was love at first sight. It was the size of a netbook (actually even thinner!), but it was a fully-powered Mac.

The love affair ended when I finally got one. I ordered one for my wife as an upgrade to her current 13" MBA. We were excited when it arrived. We unboxed it, and it was immediately apparent that there was no getting around the fact that the 11" screen was just too small for the work either one of us does. At my home workstation, my 15" MacBook Pro sits a little over 3 feet away from my eyes. The 11" MBA was 4" smaller and, at that distance away, impossible to see adequately at anything less than 800 x 600 resolution, and I really got the feeling it would have been "best" at around 640 x 480, had that been an option. However, at those resolutions, it becomes useless for other reasons, the prime being that very little actually fits on the screen at once. Even though my wife usually works with the computer closer to her, the 11" screen was still too small for her as well.

We returned the 11" MBA and bought a new 13" instead.

While my wife is comfortable with a 13" screen, I have come to the conclusion that a 15" screen is the smallest I find comfortable. I tend to have several windows open at once, while my wife generally works with only one program at a time. I keep my resolution set at 1440 x 900, and anything smaller than 15" just doesn't work for me at that resolution.

I have actually experienced a screen that is too large. For a brief time, I had a work computer hooked up to a 32" display, mounted on the wall less than 3 feet away from my face. If I had a document open in full-screen view, I had to physically move my head back and forth to read it! Needless to say, this got old quickly.

Charles Moore (several columns): Too large a display has never been an issue for me, partly due to parsimoniousness, partly to the fact that I'm a consummate laptop fan and prefer to work with the built-in display rather than mess around with hooking up a larger external one, and partly because really big computer screens don't really appeal. More on that in a bit.

Consequently, the largest computer display I've worked with for production thus far has been the 1400 x 900 resolution unit in my 1.33 GHz 17" PowerBook G4.

I found the 17-incher's screen very satisfactory to work with, but that didn't stop me from downsizing to a 13" 1280 X 800 display with my next system upgrade to a Core 2 Duo Unibody MacBook. I actually didn't find the adjustment going back to the smaller screen terribly difficult. I do miss that 100 pixels of greater screen depth that I had with the big PowerBook, but its screen resolution was actually the same as one gets on a 13" MacBook Air these days.

My various Apple laptop systems over the years have included the 9.5" 640 x 480 grayscale passive matrix display PowerBook 5300, a 12.1" 800 x 600 resolution TFT display in my WallStreet PowerBook G3, the 14.1" 1024 x 768 displays in my several Pismo PowerBooks, a 1024 x 768 12" display in my 700 MHz G3 iBook, as well as the aforementioned screens in the 17" PowerBook G4 and 13" MacBook. I still put in four or five hours a day on the Pismos and continue to be reasonably satisfied with the 1024 x 768 resolution, but I wouldn't want to go lower than that these days.

As it happens, 1024 x 768 is also the native resolution of my iPad 2's 9.7" display, and I find it marginal at that size for viewing at a comfortable distance, which for me is at least a foot away. I definitely need the lower, "reading" correction of my bifocals rather than the upper "computer" range, but even then it's not entirely satisfactory. Consequently, I'm doubtful that I would find the display in the 11.6" MacBook Air, which I otherwise like the idea of, comfortable to work with, and I have misgivings about the tight resolution of the 13" 1400 x 900 MacBook Air as well. As noted, that resolution worked well for me on a 17" PowerBook screen, but I'm apprehensive that I would be doing a lot of squinting and straining to see content with it crammed into 13" display real estate. Probably the resolution on my MacBook is the densest (133 PPI) I want to go in a 13" screen.

It mainly has to do with comfortable viewing distance. I'm not a big fan of large-screen televisions and am most comfortable sitting some 8' or 10' away from the modestly sized (by today's standards) 26" widescreen TV in our living room. With computers, I prefer to sit at least three feet away from the display, but even at that distance I think any display larger than say 20" or 22" would involve too much neck rotation to suit my taste.

Dan Bashur (Apple, Tech, and Gaming): The 20" iMac G4 was an amazing machine for its time and was only trumped by the 20" iMac G5, but as the biggest of the "iLamps", its style is still second to none - and it is one of those Macs that collectors yearn for. Desktops (aside from the iMac/eMac) have typically allowed us to select the screen size we wanted, however, as for notebooks, it's a bit more touchy, since that's what you're stuck with on the go.

For me, the ideal screen on a notebook depends on what I'm doing. The 1024 x 768 resolution at a 4:3 aspect ratio on the 12" 1.5 GHz PowerBook I am typing on right now is quite acceptable, especially for web browsing and document creation, but iy ss definitely as small as I would want to go and not ideal for gaming. It's obviously a step down from the 1440 x 960 resolution of the 15" Hi-res 1.67 GHz PowerBook I used to own, but enough pixels (just as many as the 14" Pismo) for what I typically do. Besides, I've found that the extra portability and cooler operating temperature is a fair tradeoff, so that may be a factor as well when it comes to portables (along with battery life).

If I were to purchase a brand new notebook today, I would really want it to be capable of cranking the resolution up to 1920 x 1080 for 1080p HD gaming as well as watching 1080p HD video on the go - in addition to being a very capable (but still portable) desktop replacement. The 15" MacBook Pro with the optional high resolution 1680 x 1050 screen comes close but still falls a bit short. The 17" MacBook Pro (even though it exceeds my desired spec at 1920 x 1200) is still a little too large to work with in tighter spaces, so where's the perfect middle?

I would venture to say that for now Sony is the one that has gotten it perfect on a notebook as far as screen size and resolution goes, and Apple should follow suit. The 16" Sony Vaio F Series notebook is king when it comes to multimedia while retaining portability and would definitely be the ideal notebook display size for me (along with having the full 1920 x 1080p HD resolution I crave).

Here's a few of the finer qualities of the very best Sony has to offer on their amazing 16" Vaio VPC-F215FX/Bl: Full 1920 x 1080p 3D 240 Hz 16" screen (with included 3D active glasses), Quad Core 2 GHz i7 processor, Blu-ray, backlit keyboard, ports galore (including 2 USB 3.0 along with a Memory Stick compatible card reader and a FireWire 400 port for legacy support) - check, check, and check. The only things missing (besides it somehow being a Mac running OS X) are Thunderbolt and longer battery life. In addition, all of these extra bells and whistles come a price. They bring this Vaio's run time down to 3 hours with the included 5000mAh battery. Weight is also a bit hefty at 7 lbs.

This Vaio is almost the perfect road machine for me (the battery life is the biggest detractor). At about $1,300, it's a heck of a bargain for what you are getting. The pair of Active Glasses with this Vaio are even compatible with Bravia 3DTVs!

As for displays that are too large when it comes to computing? Like I said above, anything bigger than the 16" Vaio starts becoming less and less portable when it comes to notebooks and could be an issue in tighter places. On a desktop, my 22" AOC 1920 x 1200 LCD monitor is plenty of screen real estate for me. Anything bigger than that might be overkill. Don't get me wrong! I wouldn't mind a 27" iMac sitting on my desk, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get a larger display than than 22". When I have any of my Macs hooked up to my 32" Insignia LCD HDTV, it can feel almost overwhelming at times, so anything over the 27" of the iMac is absolutely out for me.

Simon Royal (Mac Spectrum): I have used a variety of Macs with varying screen size and shape. I started using a 19" CRT with a Beige G3 running OS 9 at a place I worked, and the resolution was so tiny it used to annoy my colleagues, but it gave me so much screen real estate, brilliant for running Quark XPress, Photoshop, and Illustrator with their many tool windows.

At home I started with the same Beige G3 but with a 15" CRT monitor and then numerous iMac G3s all running at 1024 x 768. I then moved to a 17" Intel iMac (Early 2006) and then to portable Macs, and my most favourable was my 867 MHz PowerBook G4 'TiBook' with its lovely 15" widescreen 1280 x 854 fantastic screen. My current machine is a 12" iBook G4, running the same 1024 x 768 as my G3 iMacs, and while it gets a little tight when using a lot of apps, in general it is fine to use.

I wouldn't want to run a resolution any lower than that. I played with an old ThinkPad a few months ago with an 800 x 600 resolution, and it was just too cramped, and an Asus EeePC with a totally unusable 7" screen.

My next venture is to get back to the Intel world, and this would probably be in the shape of a 13" MacBook or MacBook Air. I like the idea of a netbook-sized 11" MacBook Air, but I think it would be too small for my needs.

Austin Leeds (Apple Everywhere): Quite honestly, my iPad's 9.7" 1024 x 768 display is plenty of screen for me in its form factor, but when it comes to laptops, that just doesn't cut it for some reason. The smallest size I can comfortably use is the clamshell iBook's 12" 800 x 600 display, but I prefer larger. My ideal size is a 14" 4:3 aspect ratio display at a decent resolution, for instance my Pismo's 1024 x 768 or my new-to-me IBM ThinkPad T42's 1400 x 1050 (running Ubuntu 11.04 at the moment, but soon to be 11.10).

When it comes to desktops, the 24" iMac, at 1920 x 1200, is just too much for my liking. It's too much screen to know what to do with. The 15" MacBook Pro i5 (I believe it's at the same res as the iMac) is also overwhelming for me. I've seen the 13" MacBook Air in person, and I believe I'd be perfectly comfortable with it (I must have sharper eyes than some). Heck, I think I could even get used to the 11" MBA.

One size/res that annoys me to no end is my 32" CRT TV with its 720 x 480, but that's another story....