DIY Apple Studio Display uses 2014 iMac to save $730
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Anecdotally, a lot of creators say their views increase when they do that stupid mugging.
There's some science-y thinking behind it.
https://www.digitalinformationworld.com ... utube.html
Also, this article suggesting to use the "happy-peak" in the video as the thumbnail, although they don't explain what the "happy peak" means.
https://blog.realeyesit.com/boost-video ... -thumbnail
Lots of "Best practices" to get more views suggest using thumbnails with faces prominently on it.
Not specifically about those thumbnails, but Veritasium talks about clickbait, and his experimenting with different thumbnails and how they affect views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
There are tools like TubeBuddy that let people A/B compare thumbnails for a video, so odds are they're leaning towards the techniques that work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TRjq12ScJE
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Those of us who stare at static text all day are looking for a monitor around 218 ppi monitor at 27", something that 4k can't do. Color accuracy, HDR, and frame rate is secondary if needed at all.
The cheapest commercial monitor that matches is from LG and is still around $1,300. This DYI mod easily meets those needs and beats the cheapest commercial competitor price by a wide margin.
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Wow, this is cool!
The biggest feature of this, for me, would be the ability to switch between multiple inputs. I'd love that on my LG 5k!
Maybe I should try my hand at this (with an iMac or with a naked panel).
The biggest feature of this, for me, would be the ability to switch between multiple inputs. I'd love that on my LG 5k!
Maybe I should try my hand at this (with an iMac or with a naked panel).
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You could easily throw everything you pulled out into a spare box and it would work just fine, as long as you had a way to get video out of it, or another gutted iMac shell just for easy transfer. He is NOT using the original logic board or power supply, which are both handled by the new HDMI/DP unit he picked up, so everything but the screen will carry over (including the speakers if you want them for some reason).
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I may be wrong, but it seems like it's much easier and more straightforward for individuals to monetize video content...through sites like YouTube...than to monetize the kind of long/medium-form text content you're demanding.
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Unfortunate, because I also autoskip any video guide for anything unless there's literally nothing else, rather than having to listen to a personality and fast-forward/rewind constantly. But that is the only way to extract any money out of guides, unless you're ifixit.
Recipes have long shown how to monetize personality in text, unfortunately, but that probably wouldn't carry over well enough for the kind of overeager personalities that youtube promotes.
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Not that those aren't without problems. Don't get me started on the "here is the quirky story of my trip to Europe and how I blah blah blah blah blah blah" that I have to scroll past to find the recipe. That is 100% the "stupid YouTube thumbnail face" of the print recipe website world.
Which is to say they include it because people who are not me must like it.
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Welcome to Ars, Craig.
Edit to say: I did actually read the article, and I found nothing at all worth noting. It's just a performance review (with stats) of the Mac Studio.
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I also saw no reference to the expected remaining service life of a panel that's been in use since 2014 and has no warranty, compared with a new display (whether Apple's or a 3d-party's)... This is unlikely to save any money.
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LG have been producing 5K Panels for 8 years now and the consumer hasn't seen any price reduction at all. With Apple's new display, we have a big price increase. This isn't how things are supposed to work. I remember the days when Monoprice stuck the the same 1440p 27" panel Apple were selling for $999 into a cheap enclosure and charged less than $300.
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But that's what I'm saying, there is no such enclosure out there that would fit the iMac board (other than another iMac, but then what would be the point of doing this in the first place?)
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When you can’t load the latest MacOS with security updates, you either find a way to load ChromeOS or Linux, or it basically is e-waste.
I might actually try this one day with my wife’s 27” iMac
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When you can’t load the latest MacOS with security updates, you either find a way to load ChromeOS or Linux, or it basically is e-waste.
I might actually try this one day with my wife’s 27” iMac[/quote]
True, although a 2014 27" iMac could run Linux or even Windows 10.
There's also the fact that the actual "computer" internals become eWaste with such a mod.
However, the big thing is that someone may feel the iMac is now underpowered and not usable for their needs, but the 5K 27" display is still perfectly serviceable as a display, but there's no easy way to use it just as a display without modding it.
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Things work that way when there is mass adoption of a technology. It gets a lot cheaper to produce something when you produce them by the millions. We're not there with 27" 5K displays yet. Most people are fine with 4K at the most. Some even prefer... 1440p still.
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I know – and I'd love to be able to reward any nice long-form technical articles I like, some easy micro-transaction system would be really useful there.
Still, not looking at any similar videos if I can avoid it, so it's a (totally negligible!) advertising net loss for them.
And I actually worked in a newspaper way back, so I know how hard it is to get enough money just from google ads for good, not‑obnoxious text articles, without resorting to clickbait strategies and such. Several newspapers even tried to run their own ad networks, somewhat successfully – the cut Google was taking just didn't make biz sense to them.
While I might not be an Ars subscriber (yet!), I am a paying subscriber for several of my local, high quality content papers and suggest anybody do the same if they like the content.
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Ars does their own reviews of new products, including the new Mac Studio, so there is very little incentive for them to link out to someone else who just happened to do... yet another review. In contrast, practically nobody does the kind of thing that Miani did herein, which makes his build noteworthy and easily warranted this article about his experiment. I see no real issue here.
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I refused to click on the video because nothing was circled in red with a red arrow pointing at it.
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It's definitely annoying, I struggle to decide what's more annoying, goofy faces or massive tits in the thumbnail.
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Thanks for the info, I haven't seen the Dell Canvas yet. I just happen to have 3 Studios in my environment and thinking about what I can do with them when the PC hardware is no longer suitable for the needs of the users.
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This is just recreating the external input old iMacs had.
The DP 1.4 standard had to be finalized before this could become easy (but it has been since the 5k Mac Pros shipped in 2016)
The DP 1.4 standard had to be finalized before this could become easy (but it has been since the 5k Mac Pros shipped in 2016)
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Do you really struggle that hard ?
When faced with the lack of a normal thumb nail and given the choice between , " red arrow " , " dumb face " , and " big tits " . Always go with big tits...
Oh and....
Up you game LTT .
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I stare at text all day on monitors with half that density. What am I doing wrong?
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Um, thanks for telling us all we have been doing it all wrong! Obviously, really crisp text is soo overrated and we should all go to 80x25, vector fonts be damned!
Just try it. Even going to 1080p HiDPI on a 4K monitor (not really that ideal for Mac use, since the scaling is wrong when using most PC 4K monitor sizes), I'd never go back to 1080p again, no thanks! Even for reading the web articles like these...
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Where did I say 1080?
When they make a 6880x2880 monitor, maybe I'll consider it. I'll have to scale to be able to see anything though. I did have a 5160x2160 monitor for a bit while I still worked in an office. I guess you could say it was crisper, but text was too small to read. I'll happily trade a few pixels for never stepping foot in an office again.
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That’s why I hope 8K TV’s become a thing, even though most people probably sit far enough away from their TV’s that even 1080p is enough for “retina” resolution.
I’d like it to spur the development of 8K monitors, or I can just use an 8K TV as a monitor.
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The first 5K monitor was sold by Dell for $2800, in around 2014 IIRC. With inflation that's well over $3,000.
Apple's Studio Display is $300 more than LG's $1,300 5K monitor while offering a brighter panel, much higher build quality, a built in video camera, and built in speakers, among other improvements.
That's not a big price increase over LG, it's basically the same price when you account for the brighter newer panel, the aluminum body, better stand, the video camera and the speakers. In the old days you'd expect Apple to just repackage the same panel in aluminum and jack the price 20%.
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I get paid to stare at text all day, and the price of this monitor over three years is like 1/4 of 1% of my total cost to my employer. Why wouldn't they pay that if it makes me 5-10% more productive?
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I wonder if this can be done with even older iMacs. Most 27" models still work, but the internals are unsupported by Apple, so they mostly go unused.
Could the internals of, say, a 2010 iMac, be replaced with something like a Mac Mini? Or a MacBook Air logic board? Or is it possible to find an appropriate display driver circuit so that it can be converted to a monitor?
I assume the biggest issue is connecting the panel to anything else, since it's probably some proprietary ribbon cable nobody but Apple uses. Or am I wrong to assume that?
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So what's your jibe with it, then? You literally wrote that you stare at 114 dpi monitors all day and you are fine with that. 114 dpi is pretty bad when looking for crisp text. The average 4K monitor running at 2x scale is like 190 dpi or so, no? That's an effingly huge difference...
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No argument from me. I didn't pay for my work monitors either. I told them what I wanted and it wasn't the $99 Dell special and they bought them. The monitors are fuck all compared to the other hardware I get to play with.
But I prefer ultra wides. 110ppi is sufficient for me. I can already make the text smaller than I can see. A higher resolution will just mean I need to scale everything. I can only cram so much into a given area before my eyes are the limiting factor.
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Seems to render monospace font good enough for me.
Sure, I'd like infinite resolution if I had a choice. But the comment I replied to suggested if you're looking at text, you need 200ppi. I haven't found that to be the case. Why is my subjective experience invalid but yours isn't?
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You don't really get HiDPI and scaling at all, do you? Talking about "text smaller than I can see" and all of that. The text is the effing same size, just way sharper? Cause it's a vector font rendered at 4K and displayed at 1080p screen size? Same with 5K, 1440 screen size.
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