Alright, you might not appreciate it, but it’s not a waste of money.
Maybe that’s arguing semantics, but to me a waste of money is something like a $150 HDMI cable… Or 64GB of RAM you’ll never use. Things that you can brag about but that don’t actually improve your life in any way at all.
However, the $100 extra I’ve spent on a 4K vs FullHD monitor was, I’m certain, one of the best purchasing decisions in my life.
My 4K display[1] makes spending time productively so much more pleasant, and so much less tiring, both on eyes and mind. And it just looks gorgeous.
The first time experience of watching BBC’s Planet Earth in 4K on this thing was mind-blowing. It must look absolutely incredible on an actual big screen with full range of HDR.
I also have a very cheap Chinese netbook with a 3K display (260 ppi), and I have, on occasion, used it to read books etc. I would have never even imagined doing any extended reading, of any kind, on my old laptop. The font would need to be huge to make that experience at all bearable. At least that’s an option for something like ePub or HTML, but a lot of things are available only as a PDF. On that little netbook it’s no bother to have multiple columns of tiny text on the screen, all at once, just like in a real book.
I wear glasses and with the old LowDPI devices I was always unsure if I need a new prescription or if it’s just the crappy display.
As for SSD I can strongly recommend getting one in addition to your HDD. For my workstation, I’m running a bcache setup (in writeback) with a 60GB old SATA3 SSD + 1TB HDD RAID1 and I’ve been extremely pleased with that so far.
I can only tell I’m not running an actual 1TB SSD right after I do a major upgrade. It takes at least one cold boot to promote files in the boot path to cache[2]. Every time that happens it reminds me just how much faster SSDs are for certain things.
Nevertheless, you almost get to have your cake and eat it too. Bcache (or dm-cache, a fine choice as well) will intelligently sync all the randomly accessed and most used data with the SSD and stream anything bigger (like movies etc.) directly to/from the HDD.
In writeback mode it will also use the SSD to buffer random writes, until they can be written sequentially, all-at-once, to the backing device.
It makes both your SSD and HDD so much more valuable. Strongly recommended :)
[1] http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-24UD58-B-4k-uhd-led-monitor
[2] It’s something that could be solved, though. An explicit interface to promote certain extents would do the trick. So far I think only bcacheFS offers something like that.