Ultrawide Curved Monitors for productivity

Productive at what?

I have a super ultrawide (49” 5120x1440) and it’s terrific. Having a ton of things open side by side is definitely a benefit for what I do, and as an added bonus it’s great for games if you have the specs to hit those resolutions.

Works fine with both my PC and MBP

That’s probably just down to panels and manufacturers. Asus make shitty monitors, Dells make decent ones. Mine’s a Samsung and pixel density is fine, as is ramping it up to 240hz without loss of clarity or weird flicker that some monitors get.

I mostly use it with one device but lately have been doing a lot of PiP between work and home devices.

Vertical space tends to be somewhat wasted when you’re that close to a monitor of that size, as our eyes prefers horizontal expansion at close ranges. When you’re sitting ten+ feet away it’s different. Plus it’d be pretty hard to find a 49” 16x9 monitor in my case.

I’m in one of the other PC threads talking about this very topic. My workplace had bundles of hotdesks with ultra wide monitors and they’ve been a game changer for my work. Software development with a dollop of paper pushing work and middle manager type horseshit from time to time.

I’m now looking to replicate the setup at home.

I still don’t get it. A 5120x1440 49” one has fewer pixels than a 4k. Anything lower has less. I can’t find a single ultrawide that has more screen space than a standard 16:9 4k, let alone a 5k.

Only if you need narrow and tall windows though. I tend to work with four things, each corner, and can go to six if needed, three top and three bottom.

Disclaimer: I’m 37 and my eyes haven’t started going yet, so I have my scaler slider set to Most Space. If I needed things bigger I might feel differently.

I'm interested in this, I use a Dell U2715H 27" 1440p Monitor and always have loads of shit open in parallel (docs, IntelliJ, linux terminals, skip sessions etc.) so more stuff side by side is tempting and as hopefully I'll be WFHing the vast majority of the time, worth getting something better.

They tend to be physically wider. A 32” ultrawide is still wider than a 32” standard, as the measure is on the diagonal.

Space becomes a factor then. To replace my current monitor with a 16:9 equivalent would be a 55” screen (possibly larger, I haven’t directly measured). I don’t think they even have PC monitors that size, at least not at the price and visual quality range the G9 provides.

Would it not be just filling space that's currently empty above and below your monitor...?

I mean, if you have a 60” TV, try standing a foot or two away from it and seeing if you can stand it for long. That’s really the difference for me, it’s a giant monitor that isn’t overwhelming and lets me have a ton of stuff going on at once. I don’t see it as taking away vertical space compared to a similar width monitor, I see it as giving me a ton more horizontal space compared to a similar height one.

I've done the same thing as the OP - I've binned my old 27" iMac and replaced it with a new 16" Macbook Pro. I've gone for the LG 38" thingy... the LG 38WN95C-W. It's wonderful - it took a bit of getting used to because you can see the pixels a bit (I had a 5K iMac), but it's still pretty sharp, very bright and seems to have decently neutral colours (I do a lot of Lightroom and Final Cut Pro). Best of all, you'll only need one USB-C cable to connect your MBP, and it can charge it and run video/sound over that one cable.

I also used it as an excuse to build a PC, so I run that into it too. It's 144hz as well, which is lovely when using MacOS with the correct mode selected on my Mac.

I find myself using two windows side by side much like on my iMac, but I still have loads of exposed desktop space left to store/drag files into programmes, which I find quite handy.

I managed to snag a refurbished one from eBay. They're quite expensive new.

I had this same concern when going for ultra-wide about a year and half ago. I heard lots about how great it was for gaming and immersion, but wasn't sure how nice it would be for working on. As I was working from home most of the time, it needed to be able to accommodate that as well.

Needn't have worried as it is delightful. I now have an LG 34" 1440p ultra-wide and it is a big difference from my old 27" 1440p. Can easily have multiple emails, spreadsheets, Word docs and Teams (although I normally just have that on the laptop screen) open without any difficulty.

Feel it was a much better choice than 4K, which at the time was really difficult to buy at a sensible size. Most seemed to be either 28", which would require scaling and defeat the purpose of it, or needed to basically be TV size, which would be ridiculous on my desk and likely uncomfortable to sit in front of.

The alternative to this is to have two 16:9 screens, which might offer slightly more flexibility. I know quite a few are used to that set up and might find they lose screen real estate going down to one, even if it is ultra-wide. You could get two ultra-wides and I've seen pics of set-ups that look pretty good like that (often with one on top of the other), but that would be quite pricey.

Re: sharing windows on Teams, I always move it over to my laptop. Most people seem to either just use their laptop screens or have a 1080p monitor, so they always complain everything is too small if I share it from my big screen. I can't imagine how people just work from a laptop screen all day.