Last week I tried working with 4k monitor first time. I fell in love with it instantly. Until now I’ve been using 1-2 1080p monitors and 2560×1080 ultra wide monitor at home, but 4k monitor allowed me to have everything necessary on one single screen at once. I had been putting 4k off for a long time because I thought MacBook Pro would be slow with it, but that was not the case at all. It could do 60hz and I didn’t notice anything particularly slow during one day. So, I made a quick decision to buy 4k monitor for home office.

After using it for one week, here are my impressions.

To use 4k as non-scaled full 4k resolution, I suggest getting at least 32″ monitor. I tried first 28″ monitor and thought everything is bit too small and got 32″ for home. I feel 32″ is large enough for basic 60-80cm desk, but even larger ones might be plausible, depending on your workspace.

The main bad thing with 4k monitor is obvious: you can have too much space at once, playing videos, having social media windows open and not getting focused work done. However, this is not monitor issue, but self-control issue. Work on that instead of saying 4k is not useful.

For web development, you usually need to have at least editor, browser, developer tools and terminal open. 4k monitor let’s you do that without overlapping windows and alt-tabbing. Working with data also becomes very pleasant when you can see more at once.

Working with anything graphical is just awesome. Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Final Cut, Blender, OmniGraffle and anything graphical like that benefit a lot from 4k. You can have a much larger workspace and the tool options windows don’t take all the space. Reading and studying also allow you to read and take notes, draw diagrams at the same time.

One annoying thing with 4k monitor in macOS is that when waking up from sleep, windows often to go off screen making everything confusing. I use Moom’s window layout remembering to fix this partly, but still some windows still tend to do this. Hopefully this gets fixed someday, though it seems to be long unresolved issue.

Overall, I highly recommend getting 4k monitor!