193 The Right Computers & Monitors for your Accounting Firm

Today we are diving into some of the most important Questions in accounting. PC vs. Mac Tower vs. Laptop 1 monitor vs. 2 monitor vs. 3 monitor vs. 4 monitor normal monitor vs. Ultra wide monitor. ARM vs. Monitor stand. Get ready to take a side. We're talking hardware and monitors. Okay. This is going to be an explosive one. We're going to start with computer hardware. Just how much of a pain that is, especially if you run a team, man. People talk about not wanting to manage people. I don't want to manage computers. Managing just the whole IT for. Especially with distributed work these days. It's just such a headache. Don't like man. Find an IT group that will support you in that stuff. But still it is so annoying that in 2024 when you've got things you gotta get done, somebody can be totally derailed by a computer just not starting up that day. Why is that a thing in 2024? That's so frustrating. Okay, I could tell you my struggle and you might be able to relate. Are you an accountant on the go? Do you need to be able to work from multiple places or do you want to leave the work at work? These days the vast majority of us need to be able to work from different places. And it's not to say that you got to be able to take the whole battle station on the road, man. Don't be that guy at Starbucks with the quad displays. Don't kn. I guess the version of that now is Apple Vision Pro or whatever your VR headset of choice is. We're not there yet. We may get there someday. In fact honestly Sidebar on VR for accountants. I'm. I'm a. An old VR dork. Back to the first HTC Vive. There's a future timeline where like the unique to accountants problems of needing a lot of screen real estate are made vastly better by VR. But ski goggles just. That's just not the play anyways. Most accountants have super over the top monitor setups and to make that stuff mobile is a big pain in the hiney. So you're stuck between do you pay a big old premium for a laptop only to then not really get the full work experience when you're away from the battle station. Or do you just buy a desktop which is always gonna be more cost effective, more modular, you can upgrade it over time, should generally last you longer. But then that's it. You're stuck at the battle station. I can tell you what I experienced in running a team. We had. We had about 40 people but something like 35, 35 were onshore and like 20 to 25 of those were in an office, and the others were distributed. And because we had hybrid folks, we had remote folks, we had folks that just wanted to work in the office. It created this, like, real IT headache. But the rules for everyone were the same. They could work from where they wanted to work. Like, they had to be where they needed to be to get their jobs done. And so some folks had jobs that required them to be in certain places, like if the clients wanted to meet with them in person or something like that. But besides that, they were pretty much free to work where they wanted to work. But we still had a bunch of folks that just wanted to work in an office every day. And so you're like, okay, we'll just do the reasonable common sense thing. Towers make sense here, laptops make sense there. But that's a pain in the neck because then you start building peripherals around that. What displays are going to work with the laptop, what are going to work with the tower. And then you have a snow day, and the people who work in the office say, well, I want to work from. Tracy can work from home. She has a laptop. Why can't I have a laptop? And so I ultimately, we just burned an outrageous amount of money. Everybody had laptops. We were trying to consolidate hardware, get everybody on the same stuff. So you had like some interchangeability. If something broke, you could pull in another one. That's another pain here is when every single person has different hardware, it gets harder to swap stuff in and out. And now a lot of firms these days are even going as far as like, letting folks pick between Mac and PC. Bless your heart. The more like, exclusively cloud types of firms. We're going to talk Mac PC in a bit, but the whole desktop versus laptop thing was honestly a real struggle. Only wisdom I really have here for you is try to standardize as much as possible. And the trap here is when you're like, well, I can do this other thing, that's a one off, that's cheaper, or I can get this stuff, these computers at Costco, and they're half as much. I think that's a trap. I think you end up creating more headaches than it's worth there. It's totally at the core of our, like, accountant beings to be like, super practical. This is cheaper. Why would I not do this? My answer to that would be, because time is money. Because stuff that bubbles up to you is really expensive and the place to save money isn't 400 bucks on a Computer here and there's now laptops. Different set of real headaches. Namely, how do I make that sucker as plug and play as possible? And the more like, if you think about like thinkpads and more on the enterprise level, you've got the, you know, the ThinkPad docs, you drop it in there and that is what it is. It's even got like little like lock on it. Big firms, I think they got that stuff nailed down. That's fine. That's not generally, little firm life, though. Little firm life can be an absolute mess of docks, dongles, hubs, and every one of those things will support some devices but not other devices. Ends up in a really frustrating sort of thing where you can't just seem to find something that, that just works for everybody. So as much as possible for us, we try to get everybody onto the same laptop. So the peripherals we could build around it, we found. We find one, you know, a dock that we really like or a USB C hub that we really like, then at least we can validate that it works really well for the devices, like the few devices that our team has. And also then one breaks, it's easy to swap another one in. Like we have enough people where we basically need to have that stuff on standby so that anybody can pull it in. The cost of a team member losing a day is a lot. And so to get into the weeds here for a minute on like those peripherals, many of this holds up with like PC towers as well. But when it comes to laptops, no two docs are made the same and support the same things. Really frustrating, particularly as accountants are usually doing like multiple monitor setups vernacular to make sure you got your head around USB C versus Thunderbolt. So USB C has kind of been held out as like this universal port that can make a lot of these problems go away. Where you can, like with a single plug, plug into your laptop via USB C and off of that you can run monitors, you can run all your other USB devices and even like Dell has, you know, USB C docks, but they're absolutely awful. And if you read any of the reviews for them, like, it's just terrible. And it blows my mind that there isn't a. There genuinely isn't a turnkey. Great solution for dock setups from, from Dell. But I'll run you through basically the two setups we ended up evolving through. First was we found a USB C dock that worked with our laptops. Most of our team were running XPS 13 laptops. And the beauty of A USB C or Thunderbolt dock. In most cases, this will be a powered dock. So you've got the dock itself, it's plugged into power. I put one plug into my, into my laptop there. But then everything else plugs into the dock. So my monitors are plugging into the dock. All my other USB devices, mouse, keyboard, printer, whatever you need, it's all plugged into the dock so that when I get to work, I can just pop that one cord into my laptop and I'm good to go. And in a perfect world when it works great. But man, they're still really fiddly. One note on USB C versus Thunderbolt. Because this is particularly important for setting up displays, Thunderbolt is a, what is it technically? A super set of, of usbc. So you may have ports. Thunderbolt looks identical to usbc. You probably have ports on your laptop or your PC that, you know, they look like USB C. And it may not even be clear whether or not they are Thunderbolt. Where Thunderbolt comes in handy is it has right now about twice the throughput of USB C. So going back to the example of plugging a single cord into my laptop, if I want to run four monitors off of that or two monitors, whatever it is, USB C generally isn't going to be, be able to handle quite as much. Ultimately it's gonna depend on the resolution of your displays and the refresh rate, how much data your monitors need. But look out for Thunderbolt. Cause Thunderbolt will do a lot more than USB C. And it's kind of sneaky because they look identical from a hardware standpoint. So what we ultimately ended up doing was getting folks on the same laptops finding a Thunderbolt dock that worked well. And then everybody was using the same laptops in the same docks. And the peripherals around that then weren't quite, quite as big of a deal because like the Core laptop and dock, those worked fine. And then beyond that, people could kind of do what they wanted to do. Now where we were going, and we had kind of started trialing this right around the time I was getting out of the firm was an increasing number of monitors. Now are, you may see them called USB C or Thunderbolt monitors. And if you haven't worked with these yet, the basic idea is that monitor basically becomes your dock. Rather than having a standalone dock, the monitor like functions as a dock. So I'm going to take a single USB C or Thunderbolt cord, plug that from my laptop into the monitor. On the back of the monitor will be USB ports. All the Stuff, all the other stuff that I need for my setup. And so obviously my laptop outputs to that display. But that monitor, the cord between the monitor and the laptop is also going to charge my laptop. So it's genuinely the only cord I need to plug into my laptop. And so if you're like poking around looking at Dell monitors, you will see them usually tagged as quote unquote, quote Thunderbolt monitors. Now some of these Thunderbolt monitors and there's, it's was so frustrating getting to a combination of hardware that would do exactly what you wanted it to do. Some of these Thunderbolt monitors you can then daisy chain from one to the other. So if you're like, why don't you just work with one monitor? I need two, I need three, I need four. At least in the Dell ecosystem you have a model that can be like the parent and then daisy chain downstream to other monitors. And so with a USB C cable you plug one monitor into the next monitor and it will pass through to that monitor so that I still only have one cord going into my laptop. But by connecting my different monitors, my laptop can then see both of those monitors. And the headache here is getting all of the hardware sorted out the first time and finding the combination of things that will work well for you. The beauty of it though is just being able to belly up to your desk and put one cord into your laptop. I had like a, this little wood like vertical laptop holder. It's really nice. Like you just, you slide it in there, it looks nice on the desk and I just plug in one cord. I never even open the laptop. Laptop actually cools better because it's on its side at that point. But then all the monitors come to life and all the peripherals are plugged into the monitors rather than the laptop. This is continuing to get better. A site I recommend ratings.com as spelled without an A so it's R T I n g s dot com. They do huge comparisons of TVs and monitors and all sorts of different things, but specifically have a lot of good information on picking the best monitors for work and cause that's very different than general use or gaming or all these other things. And one really helpful thing you'll find there, like right now they're top rated, best for the money sort of premium ish. Work monitor is like a 27 inch 2K Dell Thunderbolt monitor that can function kind of as that dock almost. So we're kind of getting to a postdoc world I think where folks aren't gonna be like Snapping the laptop into a dock or having a piece of hardware between the laptop and the monitor. The monitors are kind of just becoming the docks these days. And generally the monitor will cost a bit more than the non dock version. Like it was around about a hundred bucks more for the monitor to have that Thunderbolt functionality compared to the same panel that didn't have that Thunderbolt functionality. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. Y' all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing I we did it virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself, figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start, Cloud Accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked to the other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and start heading down that path. Consider Cloud Accountant staffing. Today's episode gang. It's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Did you know Live Flow has over 100 spreadsheet templates that anyone can just go out and swipe these templates. They built out In Google sheets for all sorts of things. I'm looking at it right now. We got a, we got a four week rolling cash flow forecast, a 13 week cash flow forecast, board reporting, template, break even analysis template budget, the actuals, consolidated AP dashboard, business KPI dashboard, all this stuff you can just go swipe on the Live Flow website, literally just copy the template and if you want you can just make use of those. But here's the problem. Those spreadsheets, they're not just going to magically update with the information from the accounting software, right? You're going to have to go, you got to go look over there, you got to get the thing, you got to bring it over there next month, you got to do the same thing. Something changes, you got to do it again. So if you want, yeah, go swipe those spreadsheets and spend the rest of your days king and figures manually or swipe the spreadsheet. Get started with Live Flow which will automatically sync from QuickBooks Online that data into those templates. Works with the templates they'll give you. It works with, frankly, any old spreadsheet you use. If you already got one that you love, you can make it smart by connecting it to QuickBooks. They rolled out a bunch of stuff in the last year from budgeting, you can sync budgets in from qbo. Big thing they did a couple months back was launch consulting consolidations. So you can roll up groupings in like a visual way, whether those different companies have the same chart of accounts or not. So if you are ready to make some big brain, auto updating spreadsheets or even if you just want to swipe some templates, get a taste of what it's all about. Check out Live Flow in the link in the show notes. Just to touch on PC versus Mac. Without going too deep here, I did share yesterday. I was raised in a Republican household and so I didn't grow up using Macs. I do now. Let me just tell you how uninspiring PC hardware is for me these days, how it hasn't really changed much in the last decade. Battery life on PC laptops is outrageously bad when they're new. And so you look at like an XPS 13 or something from Dell, which is like the premium, like pretty much the most premium offering they have. You get a new laptop there and it's like eight hours of battery life, but then 18 months down the road it's like, hmm, five hours of battery life. And so PC hardware in my opinion has really stagnated as opposed to Apple Hardware with which since they kicked off their own Apple silicon, the M1 chips, now we've got M3 chips. Holy smokes. Is it just really, really, really good? And honestly these days there was, I mean, decades where it's like, well, real business software runs on Windows. That's not really the case anymore. Most of the things that we use now are cloud based and the things that we aren't are hosted. So like if I got to run tax software like Ultra Tax Virtual Office or something like that, I'm running that in a hosted window where it doesn't matter if I'm on desktop or Windows. And I know a lot of folks are still hanging on to, you know, QuickBooks desktop and stuff like that. But even increasingly more and more firms are working with clients on, you know, if they still use QuickBooks Desktop in a hosted environment. So as more things now are either totally cloud based or hosted, doesn't really matter what type of hardware you're on, then it works totally fine on either. Obviously my workflows are a little different now. And another thing that Apple Silicon really excels at is, you know, like the Adobe Creative Suite and being able to render videos quickly and workflows like that. That being said, you look at the benchmarks of even a, you know, an M1 MacBook Pro, they're kind of, they're an old generation of their premium laptop still outperforms for Most tasks, most PC laptops and will at least 2x the battery life like it is an order of magnitude better. Uh, in my opinion, the pre, the, the hardware is way, way more premium. And I am, will tell you, I have never been an Apple guy, never been a Mac guy. It's just the hardware has gotten so good, it's just been really hard to ignore. And the reality is like you have the same upside that you've always had from Apple where it's like one manufacturer made all this stuff. Like you don't have a PC with components from 30 different places where they're all going to point the finger. And it's really hard to get help with Apple. Like you can literally walk into an Apple Store. You can have a single protection plan that covers everything. It is just simple. And maybe it is the old, I don't know, maybe it is the old man and me that is beginning to appreciate that simplicity more. I mean I was building custom PCs in middle school. Like that is my background. And as much as I hate to say it, everything I do is on Apple now shooting this on a Mac Mac Studio. It's mounted under the desk. It's itty bitty. I'll tell you one thing I haven't figured out yet. What does the home PC setup look like? So my kids, my oldest is seven. Now, increasingly there's situations where we need like something like a family computer for something. But my youngest is also still three and that gouge mash any button that he finds. Now my wife does a lot of computery things and she's got like a laptop that she will use occasionally. But increasingly, like my kids are going to have to start using a computer for school stuff, and I really want them to have like their own laptop. So I feel like we're like having to wait. Like growing up, you had the family computer in the living room, right? I don't know what that looks like these days or is. Or if everybody just has their own devices. I don't really like the idea of that though. What's really interesting is just the fact that ultimately our phones will become our computers, which for Windows, for Microsoft's actually going to be a serious problem. So. And we are closer to that than you think. I mean, we're talking about laptops and having a single Thunderbolt USB C, like cord running everything. My iPhone's USB C. It's pretty unbelievable how good the silicon and Apple iPhones are. Now the A17, so that's an Apple mobile chip. The A17 Pro benchmarks, which is the chip that is in my phone, they benchmark within 10% of like pretty premium PC processors, like $400 to $600 PC processors. The chip in this phone is benchmarking that. Well, processors that are probably as good, PC processors probably that are as good, if not better than the processor that most folks listening to this have in their PC. This is benchmarking within 10% of that. So at that point, if you got the same hardware in here that you have in this giant PC setup, which is like a very legacy architecture for a time when hardware had to be much bigger than it has to be now, then if somebody can just show me a path to plugging this in and being my computer, great. And so for Apple, yeah, makes sense for Google and Android, like, yeah, makes sense for Microsoft. Whoops, you don't really have that device, do you? And as everything's going cloud and few applications and business applications are like Windows desktop programs, ooh, that could be problematic for Microsoft right now. The thing that will actually make this take longer than it should to happen is as soon as Apple tells me that this can be my One device, I'm not going to buy all the other hardware from them. And an example of this that we see is the fact that iPad has its own operating system, iPadOS and the iPhone has its own operating system, iOS and the fact that the Macs have their own operating system, Mac os. And for the longest time it's been like, can't we at least consolidate like ipados and macOS, make it so that they can run each other's apps and all that stuff. But as soon as you do that, you know, if, if iPads truly do replace a bunch of Mac use cases, which everybody's always said, like, oh, the iPad is eventually just going to replace computers, right? And in some applications it can, but most it can't. But if it did, people would just buy iPads and they wouldn't buy Macs. And Apple ultimately, at least in the short term, doesn't want that. And so that whole like, impact on the ecosystem I think probably makes it longer than I wish it would take for our phones to just become the sole computer that we used. Okay, let's talk monitors, because I know that's what you're really here for. I've shared some pretty hot takes, the fact that I'm not a ton of monitor guy, and it's very dependent on the type of work that you do. But I was in a. I came of age in what was actually a fairly progressive office where we always had multiple. We always had two displays and then we went to three displays and then we went to four displays. An office with 25 to 30 people in it. And this was. How long ago was this? This? Gosh, I'm old. This was over 10 years ago. Every single person in there had four monitors, all on their monitor stands, all like. I mean, the ones on the ends were oftentimes like hanging off the edge of the desk, like the monitor stand. Because these were like 21, 22 inch LCDs back then, 16 by 9 aspect ratio, like all side by side by side. Like, this is a big old span of displays. And every time that we added one, people were like, well, what am I going to use this for? And then you gave them a couple weeks and they're like, I can never live without this. And so that was my evolution. And I have now come back full circle because, gang, we got enough things in our lives distracting us these days. Much like when we talked about desks yesterday, there's a threshold beyond which that additional space is just cold storage. And when it comes to your screen real estate, I Know what you're doing with that fourth monitor? It's your email just parked there. It's, it's your Twitter, it's msnbc. I don't. It's something terrible. It's something that you have no business having in your peripheral because you are already distracted enough. The last thing in this world that you need is a monitor dedicated to your email inbox. You're not going to forget about your email inbox. It's, you know, it's still going to be there now as I got more like out of the client work, like my needs were definitely different than the needs of the team. But we ended up reducing, ultimately reducing the number of displays that folks had. But the bigger question here is what is your total real estate? How many pixels across, how big of an area? Because that impacts like how good are your eyeballs. Like an itty bitty 4K, you know, 24 inch 4K display. Most people beyond 40 years old aren't going to be able to read. And some of these old apps we have to use, like the tech scaling doesn't work with it. We're going to get to that. Okay, first off, on monitors, something to be aware of. Four different panel types. So you may not be aware there are different types of technology, like different types of panels that are in monitors. Some are suited for certain things while not being as good as other things. So four different main types out there and then one that's, that's growing IPS top rated work monitors right now. So if you're, if you're on ratings.com and if you look at their, their like best rated monitors for work, the type of stuff that we do, a lot of these now are IPS monitors. Another very common one you see are VA monitors and most ultra wides are VA panels where they're not quite as good as the very best IPS panels, but still pretty good, very good contrast ratio which for us working with documents is important. That's VA panels, TN panels, what they're best at is they're super, super fast. And so mainly you see TN panels for like cheap gaming monitors. Really bad colors, terrible off angle viewing. So remember how monitors, when you saw them from an off angle, like it used to be very gray and stuff like that, TN displays, they suffer from that but they still actually get used quite a bit and are sold quite a bit with like pre built computers because they are a very cost effective display that is still fast, has a fast refresh rate. We're going to talk about that too because I Don't think people pay attention to that on their displays. And then fourth is the fastest growing one right now. OLED displays, just like when in TVs. LG for the last five or six years has really been pushing OLED displays. And they look, if you think about TVs, they look phenomenal. Like the upside of OLEDs is the blacks on those, on those displays are like perfectly black. The colors are extremely vibrant. If you walk into a Best Buy or something like that and you compare the OLEDs to the traditional displays, they just look so much better. And they're now beginning to work their way into a monitor technology. And so the upside of an, of an OLED and my, the display I use now is an oled. You have unbeatable color. The color is really, really good, which for me is actually very important because color grading and the accuracy of colors is really important in like the video work that I do. The blacks are perfect on the display, which is like really nice. You have this really nice high contrast look. The one knock on OLEDs is at least today, some text rendering will not be quite as good as the best IPS panels. That's the one, the one knock on OLEDs. Now something you'll see written about a lot when it comes to this type of display online is burn in issues. The fact that OLED displays can have like burn in if there's a static image for a long time on a specific part of the display. Now my display is an alienware, it's a Dell brand. The reason I got this OLED display specifically is, is they have a three year warranty that protects you from any sort of burn in. So if you have any burn in issues in three years, they will replace it, no questions asked. It's a lot of software things to solve for burn in. We saw this with TVs back in the day too. But the warranties are getting better to make this less of an issue. So that is OLED panels. Depending on what you do, if you do any gaming, if you watch much media, I actually recommend OLED panels. It's just, it's oh my gosh, it's like a world better. This episode is brought to you in part by TeamUp. Helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup and all the other offshoring options, Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly you have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, QBO and DeX. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants, thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this spot? Not anymore. And they connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Temo. Now last bonus one. Let's talk E Ink displays. Because I've always wanted E Ink displays to be more of a thing. So if you've used, if you have like a Kindle or a Nook or have ever used an E Reader, that is an E Ink display, it's not beaming the light into your eyeballs. It's actually a fake physical thing. So when you see an E Ink display, it's actually physical things being moved to make up the words and the letters and stuff like that. And so it's literally like you're looking at an object. Like that's the, the beauty of those and like the novelty of the Kindles, it's like looking at a book because what you're looking at is reflected light. Not projected light like a, nor a monitor is normally like beaming that light into your eyeballs. When you're looking at a Kindle, what you're seeing is reflected light. And so the level of eye strain for that is totally different now because it's like physical stuff that you're looking at. There's certain things that just aren't possible with E Ink technology, like the screen being able to refresh really fast and we don't really have, I don't know we've ever had color E Ink displays. But E Ink monitors are a thing if you look hard enough. There's a couple of high profile Ones that came out last year to kind of mixed reviews because the technology itself, like, there's a lot of trade offs. So like when you hit the next page button on your Kindle, it's not instant. And we've gotten used to like the monitor like and everything and scrolling and all that just being really responsive. E Ink displays are not going to be super responsive. Oh, they're remarkable. That's probably the biggest example that people see of this now too. The little remarkable that you can ride on and stuff like that. Pretty sure that's an E Ink display. But what if all of your monitors were E Ink displays and you were just able to look at that stuff? And my gosh, it would have such a big impact on how tired our eyeballs are. Every year I'd get halfway through tax season and my eyeballs would just give out. Like it was literally of all of the toll that busy season takes on your body and all of the things that can break down. It was my eyeballs that would go first. And if you poke around online looking at some of the E Ink monitors that are out there reading the reviews, it's totally across the board. It's people who couldn't get over the downsides of E Ink displays where they're like, they don't refresh that fast to the other end of the spectrum where it's like, you know, people. There's some people that can't spend more than two hours looking at a display without getting eye strain or a headache. And for those people, they're like, this absolutely changed my life. I would love to see this E Ink tech keep getting better. It's pretty niche still. You're paying a big premium for it. But if that's something you have a hard time with, check it out. E Ink is just E Dash Inc. Okay, let's talk resolution and size on displays. Um, these days you only ought to have really monitors that are one of two resolutions, either 2K or 4K. 1080pmonitors now just look fuzzy, especially as monitors have gotten bigger. Like back in the day, we were working on 1719. I remember I got my first 21 and then I got a 22 and I'm like, this is the end. I am a king. But monitors now are like, I mean, a 24 inch monitor is a small display and so a 1080pmonitor that big, it's just going to look really, really fuzzy. And so if you don't know what yours is, just right click, what is it on PC? I can't Remember video set display settings, something like that. So 1080, 1080 resolution is 1920 by 1080. That's 1920 horizontal pixels, 1080 vertical pixels, that is 1080. And doesn't seem like that long ago, like 1080p was super novel. And most of the things we watch on TV are still 1080p. But probably the most common resolution for work displays now is 2K. So 2560 by 1440. And this is a good balance from cost standpoint and sharpness standpoint. Increasingly you're getting more 4K displays, oftentimes really small 4K displays on like a laptop, which for me is the last place that I actually want a 4K display because it's so small. 4K displays are great and Windows tech scaling has gotten better. So in Windows there's a setting where you can just slide it just like on your phone. It'll make all the text bigger, all the text smaller. Now I got you here, especially if you do us tax is you are stuck using some legacy apps that are like hosted applications. I can tell you in my experience. Thompson, Reuters Virtual office tech scaling did not work and it was supes frustrating because you may want to have a super sharp 4K display, but if your text isn't scaled up at all, the text is super tiny. And so you may normally have it at like 150%, 200% text scaling. But then if your ultra text can only be 100% and it's a little tiny, you literally can't have a sharp monitor because the text will be too small. So watch out for any apps like that where like text scaling will not be supported. For me, 2K displays, that was the sweet spot. That was what we had most of the team on. The beauty of 2K displays, once you get to about 27 inch monitors is you can put two documents side by side. So I can have an Acrobat or whatever you use. I can put two documents side by side and it's wide enough for me to be able to see and work in both of those in a single display. Now I was an early portrait layout, like turn your monitor vertical setup guy, I love that. I was like, oh my monitor looks like a document now. Why hasn't it always been this way? I think that makes more sense if you just have a 1080 display, 1080p display. You can't put two documents side by side. It's just bad. And they're not usually big enough the monitors. But if that's all you got to work with a portrait 1080 display pretty good. I eventually moved away from portrait display setups though because side by side documents and a higher resolution monitor, you just get more bang for your buck there. Also Windows like the natural breakpoints for managing apps like to be able to snap it to the right, snap to the left like, which is super easy. So being able to hold Windows key, so being able to hold windows key and hit the right arrow and my current window snaps to the right half of the screen, hitting Windows key left arrow, it snaps to the left side of the screen. That just worked really well within Windows because it was easy to do. There are other utilities you can get that let you like snap stuff different ways. But for me, 2K with documents snap left and right like that worked really well. And so back in the day when we were running 720p and 1080pmonitors, we needed four. These days most displays, they're 2K, they're 4K and they are 27 inches instead of 19 in. I really don't think that we still need four displays. And if you do have four displays, tell me in the comments what is on those third and fourth displays that should be up all day that isn't just a distraction. Ultra wides I'm. This is what I'm using is a 34 inch ultra wide. Common sizes for the ultra wides now seem to have settled around 34 and then 49 is the mega humongous. Like you may have seen Mike Sylvester sharing the picture of his new setup. In my opinion, 49 inch ultra wides, I have not enjoyed them just too much. It's also very unwieldy unless you have a massive desk, like a desk that is way too big in my opinion. Haven't been super into them. Windows in my experience didn't support the natural breakpoints of apps all that well. And so you end up like managing and resizing all these things in a myriad of different ways as opposed to just like a 2K display that's not an ultra wide. I can just snap one right, snap one left now on my 34 inch ultra wide. And so the number of inches is always the diagonal of the monitor from one corner to the opposite corner. 34 inch ultra wide. I can get like three vertical documents on it basically if I wanted. If I split it in half, if I snap one left, snap one right. Those things are like kind of square at that point. Those apps I'm kind of so. So on ultra wides what I actually think was the bigger thing to me is a 34 inch ultra wide is almost like a monitor and a half. So I didn't want to have two displays but I didn't want to have one display. And so that's what made this 34 inch ultra the better. Trade off for me for most accountants where one and a half displays probably isn't going to be enough. I don't know that a 34 inch ultra makes sense for me. I really like it because I've just got it on a single monitor arm and that's it. So I've got like one mount on the edge of my desk that holds the only display that I have. Again we talked about this yesterday. Monitor arms I can't recommend enough. It's, it's. If it saves one monitor falling off your desk at some point it's already worthwhile. It gets the, it gets the monitor up off your desk without a stand under it. So it actually opens up some, some desk real estate. You can actually have a desk that isn't as deep if you use monitor arms. So my, my desk now is actually more shallow than most of my work desks were because once you get to like the monitor depth on your, on your desk you can't really put anything else under. Like that's the end of your desk as opposed to if you have your monitor on arm now you have all that free space under the monitor. Still one other thing to keep a lookout for refresh rates on monitors, that is how quickly they update. And where we pay attention to this more these days is actually on our smartphones. So if you've ever noticed after upgrading your phone, as you navigate and swipe around and all that stuff, you're like man, this feels really snappy. More premium smartphones now are, I've gotten up to 120Hz refresh rate. That is they update 120 times a second. I think there's even a couple like gaming oriented phones that now go up to 160. But in the past phones were 30 and 60 hertz. I think the base level iPhone may actually still be 60Hz. But now you get phones that are mainly 60, 90 and 120Hz. It makes a real difference for me. I like, I super enjoy a high refresh rate smartphone screen. It just feels much more responsive. And we have the same thing with computer displays. So most computer displays will have a 60Hz refresh rate. Some will go to 90, 120, 144Hz. Some even go beyond 144Hz now. But you don't perceive the difference in refresh rate on your computer monitor the same way that you do your smartphone. Because your smartphone, you will put a finger on the screen and then move your finger and then when the screen like legs behind it. That's irritating. It's not as big of a deal on computer monitors unless you game. If you game, it's a huge deal depending on the type of game. I guess if you're doing like, I don't know, stuff that isn't like very quick action oriented response time, then it's not a big deal. If you game, you'd absolutely like. If you play games that require speed, you absolutely need 144Hz display. If you don't, not as big of a deal. But if we go back to the beginning, we're talking about panel types. This is One thing that OLEDs do really, really well. You can have a really fast display that does colors super well. Normally. Like you kind of got to make that trade off between do I want a monitor that looks great or a monitor that is fast? That speed, not a big deal for office work. In fact, sometimes if you buy a display that by default will have a higher refresh rate and you don't actually need that, it can create problems with your dock or with your Thunderbolt connection or whatever you're using. Because if you have a monitor with a higher refresh rate, it's using more data. So if I want to plug my laptop into a Thunderbolt monitor or into a dock with a single cord and maybe I want to get from two monitors to three monitors, if I have a monitor that's a 90 Hz monitor or 120 Hz monitor, and I don't want that, it may actually prevent me from being able to use an additional monitor with that setup. Now, even for those higher refresh rate monitors in the settings, you can generally turn that down. So if you are bumping into limitations with a dock where you couldn't support one more monitor, it's worth double checking the refresh rates of the displays as they're currently set up. It's possible you could turn it down to reduce the throughput there on monitor arms. A lot of really cheap monitor arms out there. I will admit I am a real nerd when it comes to this stuff. If that wasn't abundantly clear today and will definitely pay for the premium option. I pretty much only buy Ergotron monitor arms now. They're not the cheapest, but they have like, they don't bounce around, they're not floppy. In 18 months time they haven't like gotten way worse. Highly recommend. Highly recommend. Monitor arms gang. This got extremely nerdy today. Tomorrow we're talking peripherals, not quite as in the weeds the next day we're talking furniture, webcams, decor, lighting. We will geek a little bit on lights, a little bit around like different lighting technologies, the psychology of lighting, how it actually impacts your brain. So we will geek a little bit in that one. I brought this up previously. Highly recommend. Ratings RTIN G S.com if you're shopping for monitors, they'll show you the best options within certain budgets. They'll figure out like you know what type of panel is going to be best for the type of work that you do, whether you just do work stuff on this monitor, whether this is also the home machine, whether you do some gaming. Also like what's the best balance between those two things? That website's killer. If you're super sick of your PC hardware and stuff breaking, give Mac a try. I in the foreseeable future will not be going back. It's very much like a old dog, new tricks thing like oh my gosh, do I really have to learn that thing from scratch? And there is a little bit of a learning period but I think we like over state or overestimate how much work it is to learn that new thing. Especially if you're like me. Sometimes it's just like a cadre thing where you're almost like not willing to be bad at a thing. You know that you'll be less efficient for a time and that eventually it will get better. But for me the worst thing is almost just like. It's almost like the embarrassment factor. I'm on this really basic thing and I'm so frustrated that I can't figure this thing out. It's embarrassing. This is what I tease my mom for and now it's me. But if you're thinking about it, do it. It's totally doable. The hardware in my opinion is way better right now. But rolling that out across a bigger team, that's. That's a different project too. Hopefully you swiped a couple tidbits today. We're going to be back with some less expensive items tomorrow and I'll see you there.