6 hours ago
3
The desk I film at every day looks great. Professional lighting, professional audio, all of it. But that isn't where I actually work. My real desk was a cheap IKEA table with four aging Dell monitors that looked like they were about to give up. So I tore it all down and built a new workstation powered entirely by Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro. It took two full days and I trashed my office in the process, but I'm really happy with where it ended up.
The Laptop
I've been planning this for almost a year, and the whole idea was to buy Apple's newest laptop and build everything around it. What I wasn't expecting was the price. My 16-inch MacBook Pro cost $7,200, and I don't think the specs are that crazy. I needed the M5 Max because it's the only chip that can drive four displays like this. I needed at least 64 GB of RAM because I max out the RAM on my older MacBook Pro every single day, and I needed 4 TB of storage because everything I'm doing with AI fills up my internal drive.
The Thunderbolt Dock
One laptop is powering four monitors and about ten other peripherals that are hidden behind the desk. The only way to pull that off is with a Thunderbolt hub, and I think the iVANKY FusionDock Ultra is the best one on the market right now. It's expensive at around $750, but it does things I haven't seen any other dock do. It connects with a dual Thunderbolt 5 cable designed specifically for the MacBook Pro, which acts like a single cable but gives you 80 Gbps of bandwidth. It also has 10 Gb Ethernet built in, and that dongle alone can cost $300 or $400.
The Monitors
I'm running four 27-inch 5K BenQ PD2730S designer monitors. They're built for color accuracy and they have a nano matte screen. Before I mounted them, I put one next to my old 4K Dell, and honestly it was night and day. The vividness and contrast were so much better that the Dell looked broken. To be fair, it kind of is broken. It's starting to delaminate.
The one thing I'd do differently is the matte finish. Matte screens cut reflections, which is great if you work in a bright room or have a window behind you, but you give up some contrast. I don't have a window over there and I don't have reflections, so I could have gone glossy and saved $100 per display. BenQ just released the MA270S, a glossy 5K monitor that's meant to compete with Apple's displays at about half the price, around $1,000 each. If you work in a bright space, get the matte PD2730S. If you work in a dark room, I'd go glossy.
Mounting all four on a VIVO quad monitor stand was the worst part of the whole build. I've broken a monitor doing this before, so this time I went slow and got my wife to help. It took hours.
Why Four Monitors Instead of One Big One
One big screen definitely looks cleaner, and I've tried for years to make one work. I keep coming back to multiple displays for two reasons. First is resolution: four 5K panels is more resolution than any single monitor you can buy. Second, and more important to me, is the edges. The bigger a display gets, the more uncomfortable the edges are to look at, and macOS puts every app's menu bar way up in the top left corner, so you're constantly reaching across the whole screen. With four monitors angled at my eyes, whichever one I'm looking at is flat in front of me.
The usual complaint about multiple monitors on a Mac is that Apple only gives you one Dock on one screen. That's why I built Better Dock, which puts a dock on every display. It's free, and if you run multiple monitors the Pro version is the one you want.
The Speakers
I've spent the last few years trying to find speakers I like more than the Polk bookshelf speakers I bought for about $100 fifteen years ago, and I still haven't. When we did a blind test, everyone, including me, picked the Polks. They're paired with an old $100 Polk subwoofer under the desk and powered by a WiiM Amp Pro. The amp is good, but the room correction is what impressed me. You run a sweep with your iPhone and it tunes the output to your room. I'm in a concrete room with terrible acoustics, and it made a night and day difference.
Those Polks were discontinued over a decade ago, so here's what I'd recommend instead. With no budget, my favorites from my testing were the Neumann KH 120 II. At around $2,000 a pair, the bass that comes out of those small speakers is the tightest and most accurate I've ever heard. Keep in mind that to get the most out of them you also need a DAC, a subwoofer, and a calibration mic. On a budget, get the JBL 305P MkII. My Polks only cost $100, but they need a $400 amp, so they're really a $500 setup. A pair of JBLs is about $350 with the amplifiers built in.
Keyboard and Mouse
My keyboard is the Logitech MX Keys S. I've compared it side by side with Apple's keyboard and I like everything about it more except one thing: no Touch ID button. It's half the price, it's built better, the keys feel better, and they're backlit. I wear an Apple Watch, which unlocks my Mac anyway, so I rarely miss Touch ID.
The Logitech MX Master 4 is, I'm confident, the best computer mouse in the world. My favorite feature is the silent clicking. You don't realize how annoying clicking is until it's gone. The magnetic scroll wheel is great, and when you flick it fast it frees up and spins on its own, which is perfect for long web pages. There's a horizontal scroll wheel on the side, back and forward buttons, and an extra button I've mapped to Wispr Flow because I'm talking to AI all day. This version also has haptic feedback. If you've never tried one, try it.
The Little Things
My new wooden desk started scratching within a few days, so I ordered more than 15 highly rated desk mats from Amazon. I hated almost all of them. The one that impressed me was from a brand I'd never heard of, HAUTOCO. It's listed as leather, I assume it's faux, and it feels more like suede. My only complaint is that I bought one that's a bit too big and it covers about 70% of the desk, but for the price, it blew everything else away.
The last piece is a very old Anker wireless charger stand with tape and a bump on it. When I first set my phone on it, it muffled the speaker and microphone, so I raised it up. I've tried magnetic chargers, but the magnet grabs the phone and the charger comes with it when I pick it up. This one is ugly, but I set my phone down and it works.
Did I Need the $7,000 Laptop?
Here's the twist. Everything I read said my old M3 Max MacBook Pro could only drive three 5K monitors, because its HDMI port tops out at 4K. But when I plugged it into this dock, all four monitors worked. A dock that can handle four 5K displays gets around that limit. I still needed a newer laptop, just not a $7,000 one. My plan was to return the touchscreen MacBook Pro and buy a four-month-old M5 Max with the same specs on eBay. A few days earlier I'd seen one for $2,200 less than I paid. Then prices went up again and those used machines are now selling for over $6,000, so I'm keeping it. It's a ridiculous splurge, but my old laptop is maxed out all day, I'm working more than I ever have, and I'm telling myself it's a tool that's going to make me money.
Check out the full video above for the side-by-side comparisons and the speaker test.
English (US) ·