Being popular isn't an indication of qualification. But sometimes it is.
It’s not, but it is? Anyway, you have cause and effect completely backwards.
It’s like saying someone should be quarterback because they’re dating the prettiest girl in school. Just because that happens sometimes doesn’t mean the causality is reversible.
“Why are they popular?” “Because people have found they’re a reliable source.”
vs.
”Why should I trust them?” “Because they’re popular.”
I'm sure he sees way more screen technology come across his desk than I'll probably see in a lifetime. If you've come to a judgement MKBHD isn't qualified, fine.
See? That’s a true qualification. There is a way to express his qualifications without resorting to the transitive property.
And, again, I’m not saying he’s not qualified, I’m saying he’s not persuasive and his review is well presented but not what I would consider a good review.
Unfortunately, he didn’t utilize the experience you’re granting him in his review. He gave marketing screenshots of two other displays and read down their spec sheets. Incompletely, and sloppily. So either he doesn’t understand what specs are important, or that detail stood in the way of his message.
The Dell, for example, he didn’t compare based on his extensive experience— he just said “it’s well reviewed”, as in by others. The fact he even threw that display into the review is absurd. It‘s lower resolution, lower brightness, lower color accuracy, plastic. It’s a budget display, not a comparable to the Studio Display.
He concludes that if what you want is this panel, there are a lot of other monitors “just like” the SD “for way less money”— but he never showed us a single one.
there are no real comparible exact specs, so it's like a Rolls Royce Ghost or something in a category in its own
There are also no cars with directly comparable specs to a high trim Camery, so why not use that as a reference? The Studio Display is a mass produced product with nicer features costing a few hundred dollars more than the Apple/LG display. The high trim Camery seems a better analogy— no other car has that exact set of features, maybe the enhancements are worth it to you, maybe they aren’t, but the difference in cost is a fraction of the lower trim version. As it is with the SD and LG display.
Granted MKBHD doesn't get granular and compare specs with everything on the market, he summarises stuff, but it was enough to illustrate the point, which is what most people want in a short review.
His personal subjective estimate and judgement is what a review is ultimately.
I can’t speak for what most people want. Maybe you’re right. Maybe they want someone to just tell them what to think so they don’t have to do that for themselves. What I would hope most people want though is not just to be told an opinion that they can take as their own but to have that opinion well supported by fact and experience. I don’t see any of Brownlee’s experience being brought to bear here, or anything more than cursory, strawman comparisons.
