Perspective: How Big Is The Screen On Your Mac?

By Carol Mary Miller • Friday, December 1, 2006 • Home » Forum Topics »

Mac Display - Carol Jack was in heaven a few years ago with a then spanking new 17-inch PowerBook.

That splurge eventually landed me a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD display. Guess what? 23 inches is not enough. Size does matter.

The hottest of the iMacs is the 20-inch model, and plenty of Mac customers are drooling over the new 24-inch iMac.

If you’ve had the opportunity to visit an Apple Store then you may have drooled a quart or so over the stunning 30-inch Apple Cinema HD display.

See the trend? As a long-time Mac user who’s gone from 12 and 13-inch displays, to a 15-inch Cinema display (attached to a Mac Cube) to a 17-inch, to a 20-inch, now to 23-inches, real estate is king.

Even now I find that the 23-inch display isn’t large enough to hold all I want to have running on my Mac. That personal fact made me wonder about the latest rumor regarding an upcoming 17-inch Mac display.

To be fair, Apple has received some criticism for not offering a low end display to match the form factor and price tag of the Mac mini, but it comes as a surprise that a smaller screen would be considered.

Why? Yes, why? Once you’ve gone to something bigger, going back to something smaller is just wrong in so many ways.

That’s just the desktop models. Jack’s had two of the 17-inch aluminum Macs (an original PowerBook and a newer MacBook Pro), and he says the same thing. Size matters. Screen real estate is wonderful.

Why? Because we’re making our Macs do more, with more applications and utilities.

If half of all Macs sold these days are notebooks, then probably more than half of those are MacBooks with a tiny 13-inch widescreen display. The MacBook Pro line is further differentiated by the 15-inch and 17-inch models.

So, assume that Apple is about to launch a new 17-inch display. Who’s the target buyer? Mac mini users? MacBook or MacBook Pro users who need a desktop display? My guess is the former and the MacBook users.

The question at hand is simple—how big is the screen on your Mac? Is it big enough? If not, what’s the optimum screen size for your needs and why?

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Classy Mac360 Photo By Carol Mary Miller | I teach English in Paris, France. My husband works for a US technology company here. He switched from PCs to the Mac 12 years ago. I told him it would improve our marriage, give us more friends, and reduce stress. It did.

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