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A friend of mine is torn between the advice of his two Mac gurus -- me, and another tech adviser. Both of us agree that the Cube is the best choice for my friend's particular needs, but we are dialectically opposed on the choice of a monitor. My recommendation is Apple's lovely 15 in. LCD Studio Display, which coordinates nicely with the Cube aesthetically, and is thematically harmonious in being a compact and light. And of course, it's a sharp, flicker-free LCD. My friend's other Mac brains trust is advising him to get a LaCie ElectronBlue 19" CRT, which he personally uses several examples of and swears by. He argues that the La Cie offers about 10% greater usable viewing area (16.5" diagonal vs. 15"), superior color accuracy, and sells for Can$800 versus Can$1,175 for the Apple LCD. His arguments are factually true, but it is still a CRT, 103 year-old technology that IMHO has reached the end of its rope. Scuttlebutt has it that Apple will discontinue selling CRT monitors later this year (the only one left is the 17 in. Studio Display) and switch entirely to LCDs, except for the iMac, which I expect will also go LCD in its next major revision. I think Apple is on the right track. I became an LCD fan within a week or two of using my first PowerBook back in 1996. Even though that base 5300 only had a tiny, 9.5 in., passive matrix, grayscale display, I was hooked, and almost immediately preferred it to using the very nice color 14 in. Trinitron on my desktop machine. I've never looked back, so to speak. I still have a CRT 15 in. multiscan NEC monitor on my backup UMAX S-900, but I find that CRTs give me eyestrain, are ridiculously big and heavy, wasteful of electricity, and emit electromagnetic radiation. The LCD doesn't flicker, doesn't generate static electricity (at least nearly as much as a CRT), is parsimonious of electricity, emits only a tiny fraction of the radiation that a CRT does, is compact and light, and has a "gentle" viewing quality compared to the harsh glare of a CRT. Yes, the LCD costs more, but if up front cost was the only object, we would all be using cheap-o PC boxes. I don't know which monitor my Cube-purchasing friend will settle on, and to be fair, he would probably get quite satisfactory performance with the La Cie 19 in. unit, which is indeed a nice monitor as CRTs go, but down the road, I think he would thank himself for spending the extra Can$375 for the LCD.
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