Everything is gray?

[AppleHaterLover]

Something that's peeving me:

Text that used to have good contrast "be either white or black" is now a muddish gray.

E.g. the volume bar squares when you're turning the volume up and down is now gray instead of white.

Text in Settings is now gray instead of black.

Heel even text in SPOTIFY is gray instead of the nice white it was previously.

Am I going crazy or has this happened to someone else?

 

[WishIWasHere]

Something that's peeving me:

Text that used to have good contrast "be either white or black" is now a muddish gray.

E.g. the volume bar squares when you're turning the volume up and down is now gray instead of white.

Text in Settings is now gray instead of black.

Heel even text in SPOTIFY is gray instead of the nice white it was previously.

Am I going crazy or has this happened to someone else?

I noticed some of those things too, and also find it kind of annoying.

 

[AppleHaterLover]

I noticed some of those things too, and also find it kind of annoying.

Good thing I'm not alone. But why the hell would they do this? Putting gray text against a gray background? So much for accesibility.

I'm looking for a way to fix this...

 

[chrisherbert]

The text hasn't changed color, it's just appears much less heavy than it did before because subpixel antialiasing has been disabled system-wide. OSX used a quirky implementation that made subpixel antialiased text look much heavier than it should, especially when the text is light-colored against a dark background (as in the Spotify interface).

I'm a web developer, and this inconsistency has bugged me for a long time, because it meant that website text looked radically different on OSX than it did on other platforms (including other Apple platforms, like iPhone and iPad - they never used subpixel antialiasing).

So I consider this a step in the right direction, although it will take some getting used to. I also expect some applications, like Spotify, to adjust the weight of the text they use to more closely resemble the "old" appearance. I agree that in this case it just looks too light.

 

[WishIWasHere]

The text hasn't changed color, it's just appears much less heavy than it did before because subpixel antialiasing has been disabled system-wide. OSX used a quirky implementation that made subpixel antialiased text look much heavier than it should, especially when the text is light-colored against a dark background (as in the Spotify interface).

I'm a web developer, and this inconsistency has bugged me for a long time, because it meant that website text looked radically different on OSX than it did on other platforms (including other Apple platforms, like iPhone and iPad - they never used subpixel antialiasing).

So I consider this a step in the right direction, although it will take some getting used to. I also expect some applications, like Spotify, to adjust the weight of the text they use to more closely resemble the "old" appearance. I agree that in this case it just looks too light.

Hmm, interesting. I’m not really a big techy guy, so most of that is gibberish to me lol. Regardless of the reason, I find it annoying. I mean I like grey just fine, but I don’t want EVERYthing grey. I really prefer a little color and contrast to set things apart. I know a lot of people prefer the OS to disappear into the background as much as possible, and I get why. Just not my thing.

 

[chrisherbert]

Hmm, interesting. I’m not really a big techy guy, so most of that is gibberish to me lol. Regardless of the reason, I find it annoying. I mean I like grey just fine, but I don’t want EVERYthing grey. I really prefer a little color and contrast to set things apart. I know a lot of people prefer the OS to disappear into the background as much as possible, and I get why. Just not my thing.

It really isn’t more gray than it used to be, just less bold.

It’s likely being done to make it easier to render more of the UI using the GPU, as subpixel antialiasing makes that challenging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17477526

Personally I like grayscale antialiasing better, although the weights of some UI text should be tweaked a little.

 

[CTHarrryH]

Yup agree - I've been fooling around with all sorts of setting in the last 24 hours and haven't really gotten what I want - fonts also seem smaller.
Much harder to read
I've read on some thread that it relates, at least for some, whether you have Retina display or not - I'm running MacBook Air so no retina.Makes Mac hard to use. Hope I get used to it.

 

[AppleHaterLover]

Just went back to my Mac after a day of work on Windows and yup, text is horrible. Seems fuzzy, low-res, low-contrast. Complete ****. This was not the case 24 hours ago.

Why the hell did they do this??????

 

[chrisherbert]

This was something that was going to happen at some point. Neither iOS nor Android ever used subpixel antialiasing, and modern Windows applications don't either, all for two reasons - you just can't use it on devices that can be rotated, and it's a huge pain to deal with subpixel anti-aliasing when using the GPU.

I think the retina thing is a little bit of a red herring - while subpixel antialiasing is arguably less useful on retina displays, OSX's implementation still made the fonts look really heavy on high DPI screens, just as it did on standard screens.