As I write this blog post today, it’s my last day of the summer break before I resume my final year of high school tomorrow. Since I got to a boarding school, and stay there throughout the week, I wanted to write a quick little blog post about my desk setup there!
I have been a “desktop person” for the longest time I never really liked laptops and their small screen sizes and ergonomics but I had to get a MacBook for school. The MacBook I use for school is a 13” MacBook Air with the M2 chip with an 8 core GPU, 16GB ram and 256GB storage. It’s a powerful laptop and absolutely breezes through large iOS apps, 4K video editing, Figma projects, occasional 3D modelling, and of course- schoolwork. I have no complaints about this laptop, it’s fantastic, apart from the absurd storage pricing.
In February, when I got my Apple Vision Pro and started using Mac Virtual Display with my MacBook and iMac at home, I realised how much better having a large screen was, but more importantly how much better having that upright posture was when sitting at the desk. As an IBDP student, most of my school work happens on my computer at my desk and my software development stuff too, so having that better posture really makes a world of a difference.
I decided I needed to get a monitor for my school desk setup, but I didn’t want to spend too much money on it. My desk is in a shared space, so I don’t want to incur too much of a loss if anything goes wrong. I remembered I had this unused monitor laying around somewhere that I could put to use here. It was missing a stand, so I found a stand on Amazon that worked perfectly for my school desk setup. So once the stand arrived, I put it up on my desk, and here’s how it looks:
So the monitor I am using here is no Studio Display or anything fancy- in fact, it’s a 720p DELL monitor I got in 2019 to use for my Raspberry Pi projects. It’s probably worth about ₹3,500 ($40) at most today, so it was okay to risk using this at a public space at school, and since it wasn’t being used at all at home, at least I could put it to use. Surprisingly, the display does get pretty bright; initially, I had kind of accepted that this display wasn’t that bright, but later when I was going through the monitor’s settings, I found out that I was at 25% brightness all the time that I had been using it and instantly corrected my mistake.
Now, you’re probably wondering why I made the decision to use a 720p monitor. The simple reason to this is, it simply makes my posture a LOT better. I don’t have to bend down and I slouch a lot less when I’m using the monitor. Most of my time is spent writing code, reading articles, and writing for my assignments or blog and for working with text, a 720p monitor gets you by just fine (Although I do find myself appreciating how much better my MacBook looks when I go to my classes in the morning, hahaha). For the times when I am editing videos, I’ll keep the timeline on the monitor and the video playing on my MacBook Air, which allows me to color grade it properly while also focusing allowing me to keep my posture up right for a little longer than I otherwise would.
When I’m purely reading an article, I’ll turn the monitor to 90° because this stand supports rotation (which is kind of cool) and I’ll shut my MacBook’s lid and rely on my mouse for scrolling through the article. While we’re on the topic of the mouse, my mouse of choice is the Apple Magic Mouse. It works really well with a Mac, has amazing gestures, and works out well for my hand. Charging is the only annoyance, but it’s once every few months so it never really bothers me.
The skin you see there on my Magic Mouse is one I designed myself, on my iPad! I put the same design on my Apple Pencil and Charger too. It’s a cool little thing for me since I like adding a personal touch to everything I own, and it also helps me set mine apart from other people’s stuff and ensures no one just picks mine up on accident. My school has iMacs in the computer lab and it gets confusing when I set my Magic Mouse down, so at least that won’t happen anymore. P.S. I took these desk setup pictures before I printed these skins, and I’ll be using them at school starting tomorrow!!
When I’m solving a question, I usually like putting the question up on my monitor and keeping my iPad in front of me to solve using my Apple Pencil. I love using the Apple Pencil for my schoolwork since it helps me save up on a lot of paper, gets rid of a lot of clutter on my desk and helps me find stuff really quickly. It’s an incredible tool for students!
The iPad I’m using here the 10.9” iPad Air from 2020 with the A14 chip. It works great for schoolwork and stuff, but I really miss the lack of stage manager, secondary monitor support, and soon, Apple Intelligence. Regardless, it works out well for my use case at the moment, it’s not a bad iPad at all. I use a cheap “Magic Keyboard” I got off of Amazon along with it (also what I am using to write this blog post), it costed about ₹6800 ($80) and I think it’s much better than Apple’s own in terms of the quality of materials as well as the price. I went on Amazon, looked up Magic Keyboard, and purchased the first one on the list after sorting from lowest to highest price. I really can’t complaint, it does everything I want it to. The only disadvantage is a slightly laggy trackpad which I have gotten used to, and the fact that it has a battery that adds a lot of weight, almost as much as the iPad itself. The battery only has to be charged like once in 3 months and I’ve only charged it twice since I got it in December, so that claim holds up pretty well. I had the Apple Smart Keyboard Folio prior to this, which costed nearly thrice as much and while I liked the typing feel and lightweight of that keyboard, it stopped working in 2 years and got all torn up; would not recommend anyone buy it.
And that about wraps things up in terms of my school desk/tech setup. I’m the only crazy one to have ever brought a monitor to our school, but hey, it has to start somewhere, haha. I hope you enjoyed reading this one, I’m excited for my final year of high school to start tomorrow, and let’s see where this year takes me! I hope I can continue writing these blog posts because I’ve really been enjoying writing these. I’ve also been working on a cool little app recently which has an amazing story behind it which I can’t wait to share with you; it’s been stuck in App Store Review for over a week now but I’m hoping it gets approved soon. Anyways, thanks for reading, see ya next week!
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