How can apple sell 2880x1800 displays for a sane price...

[-Slacker-]

...While other manufacturers would demand both your kidneys for a 20-something inch monitor?

One argument I remember hearing is that the price would go up exponentially - up from 15 inches, but there are 80 inch 4k tv's coming out this year (for a pair of kidneys, true); On the other side of the pond, I hear people saying the opposite - that making small 4k monitors would be even more expensive, because it wouldn't be economically feasible to manufacture them at that high of a ppi.

So there are laptops with insanely high ppi, and 84 inch 4k tvs, which suggests that neither of the above is true.

Why, then, are there no reasonably-priced ** 4k PC monitors on the market yet?


** - Not to be confused with cheap; Just something that can be had for a few thousand dollars.

 

[blackened23]

What are you talking about ? Its a 15 inch display with that resolution, costing 2200$. Other 15" notebooks are in the less than 800-1200$ range for IPS and TN panels.

You understand that the display is the gargantuan cost in the rMBP? The price is in line with what it costs to make. Nonetheless I would never buy one because I despise Apple's litigious nature. As far as 4k PC monitors, it will happen next year - the PC will beat Apple to 4k by a long shot. Intel is making a big push for it, and LG/sharp/samsung have 4k displays in production already.

Unfortunately I highly doubt this will change the people that cling to 1080p for dear life, I cannot stand 1080p personally - unless its on a big screen with me sitting 10 feet away. On a PC? Forget 1080p on a 27" display. Thats just me though.

 

[Skurge]

The rMBP isn't much more than a standard 15inch MBP.

 

[philipma1957]

What are you talking about ? Its a 15 inch display with that resolution, costing 2200$. Other 15" notebooks are in the less than 800-1200$ range for IPS and TN panels.

You understand that the display is the gargantuan cost in the rMBP? The price is in line with what it costs to make. Nonetheless I would never buy one because I despise Apple's litigious nature. As far as 4k PC monitors, it will happen next year - the PC will beat Apple to 4k by a long shot. Intel is making a big push for it, and LG/sharp/samsung have 4k displays in production already.

Unfortunately I highly doubt this will change the people that cling to 1080p for dear life, I cannot stand 1080p personally - unless its on a big screen with me sitting 10 feet away. On a PC? Forget 1080p on a 27" display. Thats just me though.

yeah I do more on a 46 inch 1080 p sony tv while sitting about 10 feet away. depends on your eyesight. RETmacbook pro 15 inch is for people with outstanding close up vision.

Not my 55 years old double cataract surgery eyes!

 

[Haserath]

Nexuiz has a 2560x1440 27" display that should be out soon for $430, though apparently it's A grade instead of A+, which shouldn't be a big deal.

Smaller screens are economically cheaper to produce as long as they have decent yield with high density.

I'm not sure, but is Apple the first to use a different plane for the pixels and signals? Did this help get cheaper high density displays?

Apple can also afford bulk orders for cheaper panels. Throw a little weight around and you can get things a bit cheaper.

 

[blastingcap]

I thought Nexuiz was a game

 

[postmortemIA]

I thought Nexuiz was a game

it's a game, if you win no dead pixels or panel distortions

 

[TemjinGold]

Apple sells things for a sane price?

 

[Haserath]

it's a game, if you win no dead pixels or panel distortions

Exactly!

My mistake, there goes me trying to remember something off the top of my head. I meant Nixeus. Can't you at least give me brownie points for getting all the correct letters, even though my s is backwards?:whiste:

 

[ViRGE]

...While other manufacturers would demand both your kidneys for a 20-something inch monitor?

One argument I remember hearing is that the price would go up exponentially - up from 15 inches, but there are 80 inch 4k tv's coming out this year (for a pair of kidneys, true); On the other side of the pond, I hear people saying the opposite - that making small 4k monitors would be even more expensive, because it wouldn't be economically feasible to manufacture them at that high of a ppi.

So there are laptops with insanely high ppi, and 84 inch 4k tvs, which suggests that neither of the above is true.

Why, then, are there no reasonably-priced ** 4k PC monitors on the market yet?


** - Not to be confused with cheap; Just something that can be had for a few thousand dollars.

You're partially right, but also missing part of the picture. Monitor prices are not dictated by a single factor, so they aren't priced along a single continuum. As such there are two major factors driving monitor costs:

1) Monitor size. Larger monitors are of course composed of larger electronics layers, all of which need to be produced with few-to-no defects. Just as the odds of a defective GPU go up with die size, the odds of a defective layer go up with the layer size, particularly the thin film transistor (TFT) layer. Larger monitors also flat-out require more material to build, which also has an impact on cost.

2) Pixel density. Again with a focus on the TFT layer, the cost of manufacturing a display depends a great deal on pixel density. The greater your pixel density, the smaller the features of the monitor need to be, which is a challenge in and of itself. This impacts the TFT layer the most, as now you need more transistors, which means the odds of a defect just went up.

As a result, monitor prices are basically dictated by a pair of curves. One curve is the monitor size, which has a positive slope (rises). This mean that monitor costs increase with size of the monitor. Meanwhile the other curve is the pixel density, which when normalized for monitor size has a negative slope (decreases). For any fixed resolution, as you increase the size of a monitor the pixel density goes down and so does the cost of manufacturing. In other words, monitor costs decrease with the size of the monitor.

So to answer your question, the price of a monitor depends greatly on the nature of the price curves. If monitor production costs are more sensitive to overall size than density, then you'll be able to build a fairly small (but high density) monitor for less than you can build a large (but low density) monitor.

With that said, even with their larger sizes, laptop displays may just be at the edge of a production sweet spot. A desktop display wouldn't need to be quite as dense, but it's so much larger that the cost of producing a monitor that large starts to become an issue.

Finally, I would note that I haven't even gotten into economies of scale. 2600x1440 monitors aren't high volume items, so there's going to be some inefficiencies due to their low volume.

 

[blackened23]

Now that brings back memories of ECO101, economies of scale. Good info there, didn't realize the info on what determined screen cost.

Anyway, I hope PC adopts some of these higher resolution displays sooner rather than later - it appears that 2560x1440 may be the new 1080p for PCs since a TON of new 2560x panels are being released this fall, and the LG panels used in them are apparently substantially cheaper than the ones used in prior generations of IPS panels.

 

[Grooveriding]

Whatever the price is, rest assured Apple has it marked up to obscene profit levels. I'm sure they are getting a price on those panels no one else can. Apple can and does sell crap on a stick and people still buy.

 

[ViRGE]

Whatever the price is, rest assured Apple has it marked up to obscene profit levels. I'm sure they are getting a price on those panels no one else can. Apple can and does sell crap on a stick and people still buy.

That may be true in general, but that is definitely not the case on the rMBP display. If you haven't seen it before, it's just jaw-dropping fantastic. It's the standard all future 15" laptops are going to be held against.

 

[Grooveriding]

That may be true in general, but that is definitely not the case on the rMBP display. If you haven't seen it before, it's just jaw-dropping fantastic. It's the standard all future 15" laptops are going to be held against.

I've never seen one yet. I can believe it looks awesome though with that ppi to screen size ratio. I'm still betting they are making a nice profit on these laptops because they're going to keep pushing these screens going forward and Apple its self will also be held against this quality and it will be expected.

 

[hyrule4927]

Hard to regard the price of any Apple product as sane, sure it wasn't too hard to work it in considering the massive profit margin they already have on Macbooks.