Default Apple Display Calibrations

[silentsage]

I've owned quit a few Apple Powerbooks, MacBooks, iMacs, and Apple displays over the years. All of them came with default display calibrations that were poor. The displays themselves have been pretty good, but they're just calibrated wrong when shipped from the factory. The only exception was my old 30" Apple display.

Is there a reason why Apple does this? It seems a shame that these machines have genuinely good displays, but they're just not set up properly "out of the box".

Apple's pretty good at getting details right, so I'm curious why they do this.

I don't thnk it is because they buy displays from multiple manufacturers. In my work the products I design use LCD panels from multiple companies, and we don't have this issue (at least not to this extent).

 

[vocalcity]

You know, I was wondering this exact same thing recently.

Users can calibrate screens themselves, but many won't. I'd also expect Apple would want their displays to look as good as possible in retail stores.

So, it is somewhat puzzling that Apple doesn't make more effort here to ensure at least a favorable color profile is applied to their computers.

Apple has more control over this than many manufacturers -- the color management in OS X is effective, and many of their machines have a built in screen, which limits the amount of variation.

The Unibody MBP 15" has two potential panels which have different characteristics. Yet, these laptops ship using a single default color profile, which from personal experience is far from optimal. Even if a different profile was provided for each screen it would be an improvement over the current situation.

Overall, I think this is a missed detail and it beats me why Apple don't give it more attention.