Dell U3818DW UltraSharp 38" Curved Monitor

I had a lot of angst in choosing this monitor vs the equivalent LG vs a cheaper 4k 43" monitor. I had concerns about quality and warranty service on the LG, which has official support for Mac. This Dell has no official support for Mac, but does have a good reputation for quality. In the end I decided on the Dell and so far have been happy with it. This is 100% a work monitor for me, so I'll only be commenting from that aspect. Also, work for me is email, programming, powerpoint, etc, nothing to do with video editing or high-end graphics. One of my primary concerns was unscaled ppi since I wanted as much real estate as possible - my previous dual monitors had around 94 ppi. This Dell rings in at 109 PPI which was at the upper bound of what I wanted. A 43" 4k monitor is 102 ppi, which is better but I ultimately decided 43" is just too huge to fully utilize the whole screen, plus current 43" monitors aren't curved. The 109 ppi turns out to be fine. In the attached photo I have a PDF at 100%, and the same PDF slightly zoomed. Ditto for the web browser. I do tend to zoom in by a notch or two, but not always. I've also pulled the monitor forward a bit so I sit closer to it than my previous 94 ppi monitors (24" 1920x1200 resolution). The other major concern I had is screen-sharing on web calls. 4k (or 3840x1600 in this case) is just too high-res for screen sharing. So I've been using the PBP (picture by picture) feature to split the screen. I reduce the resolution of the shared screen to 1080p and it works perfectly. To do this I just add a display port cable to my MBP in addition to the usb-c, and it all works perfectly from my one MBP. The monitor doesn't switch automatically - you have to go into the menu and select PBP so that's a bit of a hassle but overall it works great. I only do this once or twice a week - if I had to do it every day then I'd probably just reduce the resolution of the whole screen instead of splitting it. For the usb hub capability I only use my Logitech mouse's usb receiver plugged in to the Dell, and it works fine. Moving the mouse doesn't wake the Mac, but tapping a key on the magic keyboard does the trick. Note that usb-c doesn't have enough bandwidth to support both the near-4k resolution and high speed usb (usb 3.0 I think?), so if you rely on an external hard drive at usb 3.0 speeds, you'll need to either connect it directly to your MBP or use DisplayPort for the video feed and usb-c for the data feed to drive the Dell's usb hub capability. Other reviewers have noted that you can't control the volume of the Dell speakers from the MBP and that is correct. However the problem is that MacOS doesn't support that functionality, so it's not a fault of the Dell. You can see in one of the attached photos that I use a Jabra bluetooth speakerphone anyway, so I bypass the Dell's speakers entirely on conference calls. If any readers are hesitant about the curve, you absolutely shouldn't be. I was initially hesitant about the curve until I realized that with my dual monitors I had them angled in towards me. So the curved monitors do the same thing you'd do if you had multiple monitors anyway. If anything, I now think I'd like a more aggressive curve for any future monitor! Some final odds and ends. I use a single usb-c to connect to the Dell and it works great (until I need to do PBP as noted). I use my MBP in clamshell mode as you can see in the photo. Turning the Dell off while the MBP is on and in clamshell mode causes issues so I just leave things alone and let the MBP sleep on its own, and then the Dell sleeps on it's own, and everybody is happy until I tap my magic keyboard and everybody wakes up the next morning. Overall I'm very happy with this Dell (except now wishing for an 8k 43" ultra wide curved monitor in the future!). I hope this review helps anybody who's sitting on the fence, especially MBP users.