Fully Loaded Air <----- Over Pro

[Technerd108]

I thought milliseconds are for gaming, but that blur when scrolling on pro was quite noticeable to the point of not being able to skim text while i scroll (i scroll docs a lot for work).

On windows gaming laptop i didn’t have much time or energy to play, but i sure appreciated the fact i could read through text faster skimming while scrolling.

Ms show how fast screen changes the picture (or one color to another) so text refreshes faster and one can actually read while scrolling.

Air has 25-30ish ms screen which is faster than pro, so it makes up for it thus makes the gap smaller (not so noticeable).

I would guess oled is their solution to this problem.

The term is called screen tearing when the slow response time causes text blurring.

TestUFO: Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT Indicator)

TestUFO: Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT Indicator)

testufo.com

This is an issue with mini led. Another issue is a halo effect that in certain conditions can be very noticeable. Some people see this more than others and can lead to the feeling of something being off with the screen.

I complained about both of these issues and got pounded by pro Apple enthusiasts on this forum. Somehow I was the only one to notice. I noticed both issues as I had Windows laptops with 120hz screens that didn't have either of these issues.

The thing is no matter what the screen tech is there are trade offs. Color accuracy and brightness are way better on mini led and blacks are very good but response time sucks. OLED screens used to suffer from slow response times too but they have improved very quickly to no longer be an issue while mini led still has the same limitations.

Oled screens also suffer from poor white balance. The screen looks vivid but not realistic. Whites never look true white and while LCD is also not true white gets a lot closer than OLED. This off white balance can bother a person over time. I have to switch to my air after using my Amoled laptop for this very reason.

I was really hoping Apple was going to develop micro led which should solve the halo effect. I was hoping successive gens of mini led would have better response times but I haven't seen any changes?

 

[1BadManVan]

If I was only worried about at my desk, I would buy the air, thermal pad it and get the active cooling vertical dock and USB C Hub. I am more worried about on the move. We do alot of content while travelling and right now, my current Dell laptop has all the ports that I need. 2 USB C TB4, 2 USB A, an HDMI, and full Sized SD card reader. Not to mention this is a 14 inch 2 in 1 lightweight laptop.

This laptop I am on now is the reason I can't do an air. I would have to go Pro by default of ports.

That’s why I own one of these, very small and light, designed to plug into the air and get all the ports you need

 

[Technerd108]

That’s why I own one of these, very small and light, designed to plug into the air and get all the ports you need

I wish they would put some rubber on the side that faces the laptop. Lol.

I have one of those adapters and they are very nice and match the MacBook but they are all aluminum and fit so close to the MacBook I am paranoid they will scratch my finish.

 

[1BadManVan]

I wish they would put some rubber on the side that faces the laptop. Lol.

I have one of those adapters and they are very nice and match the MacBook but they are all aluminum and fit so close to the MacBook I am paranoid they will scratch my finish.

Nah, had this one for over 3 years, not a mark. Obviously careful when inserting it but zero issues

 

[Technerd108]

Nah, had this one for over 3 years, not a mark. Obviously careful when inserting it but zero issues

Well, to be fair you don't own midnight right?? Lol

 

[ctjack]

The term is called screen tearing when the slow response time causes text blurring.

TestUFO: Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT Indicator)

TestUFO: Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT Indicator)

testufo.com

This is an issue with mini led. Another issue is a halo effect that in certain conditions can be very noticeable. Some people see this more than others and can lead to the feeling of something being off with the screen.

I complained about both of these issues and got pounded by pro Apple enthusiasts on this forum. Somehow I was the only one to notice. I noticed both issues as I had Windows laptops with 120hz screens that didn't have either of these issues.

The thing is no matter what the screen tech is there are trade offs. Color accuracy and brightness are way better on mini led and blacks are very good but response time sucks. OLED screens used to suffer from slow response times too but they have improved very quickly to no longer be an issue while mini led still has the same limitations.

Oled screens also suffer from poor white balance. The screen looks vivid but not realistic. Whites never look true white and while LCD is also not true white gets a lot closer than OLED. This off white balance can bother a person over time. I have to switch to my air after using my Amoled laptop for this very reason.

I was really hoping Apple was going to develop micro led which should solve the halo effect. I was hoping successive gens of mini led would have better response times but I haven't seen any changes?

Macs in general cause some eyestrain to me while i could work on windows for much longer.

I guess you pointed it out correctly: for the money one can build 1) fast 120hz+ 2) responsive (2-5ms) 3) wide color accurate (dci p3) 4 high brightness screens - but not everything together.

Well windows proves that can be done, but that again is 2500+ dollar segment with plastic cases.

Apple can’t move away from variable 120hz otherwise macs would be no better than 5hr gaming laptops with always on 120-144hz displays.

I guess they chose higher brightness panel with p3 compromising on panel response times: my gaming windows really opens even folders faster upon click due to this.

Though windows side has 300 nit screens that suit me well in every aspect: they are not as cool as macs but it will do for me.

I guess it is like a world of take out restaurants. Until recently i didn’t really care or know much about calories, micro and macronutrients. But lately making right choices, i wrote off all my go to places except one. Even that one place could use higher quality cooking oil but chose not to for profit margin reasons.

Basically no one outside would make the food the way you could make for yourself: bare minimum ingredients without hard to pronounce or spell chemicals yet chic fil a sandwich ingredients look harder to read than my whole chemistry book in high school.

I guess apple makes the screens that please most but not be the most healthiest.

 

[Technerd108]

It has nothing to do with money.

All screen technologies have limitations. You can't have OLED blacks and LCD whites. Both technologies are better at certain things. LCD has better brightness and white balance but has poor blacks.

Response times, refresh rates, frame rates are all important but different types of technologies can only balance so many things. It is sort of like juggling. You can only have so many balls in the air before a drop. You can only have so many features in LCD or OLED before something drops.

Mini led was an effort to improve LCD tech with much better blacks. Mini led presents different limitations from OLED and LCD IPS. So each new technologies solve some problems while presenting new ones. Seems this is going to be a constant dilemma until we get a tech that can do everything at once.

 

[Technerd108]

Macs in general cause some eyestrain to me while i could work on windows for much longer.

I guess you pointed it out correctly: for the money one can build 1) fast 120hz+ 2) responsive (2-5ms) 3) wide color accurate (dci p3) 4 high brightness screens - but not everything together.

Well windows proves that can be done, but that again is 2500+ dollar segment with plastic cases.

Apple can’t move away from variable 120hz otherwise macs would be no better than 5hr gaming laptops with always on 120-144hz displays.

I guess they chose higher brightness panel with p3 compromising on panel response times: my gaming windows really opens even folders faster upon click due to this.

Though windows side has 300 nit screens that suit me well in every aspect: they are not as cool as macs but it will do for me.

I guess it is like a world of take out restaurants. Until recently i didn’t really care or know much about calories, micro and macronutrients. But lately making right choices, i wrote off all my go to places except one. Even that one place could use higher quality cooking oil but chose not to for profit margin reasons.

Basically no one outside would make the food the way you could make for yourself: bare minimum ingredients without hard to pronounce or spell chemicals yet chic fil a sandwich ingredients look harder to read than my whole chemistry book in high school.

I guess apple makes the screens that please most but not be the most healthiest.

I am not sure what the restaurant analogy means? I think you are talking about profit margin. You are equating cheap ingredients used in fast food to boost profits as the same reason why Apple screens are not healthy or cheap?? Not really sure here.

Apple screens are the same as Windows except for mini led as most Windows laptops would either have 60/120hz ips or 120hz oled which is the same tech in most Apple screens.

Mini led are expensive to produce and was an answer to OLED brightness and white balance problems but introduced screen tearing and halo effect. If they would have produced micro led they may have been able to solve those issues but it may have been too costly compared to OLED. I don't think that is greed but rather good business decisions??

That being said I wish that they would have produced a micro led screen if it would have had a faster response time and got rid of the halo effect rather than just stuck Samsung or other OLED panels. The color accuracy/white balance and brightness with improved blacks was better than OLED on mini led so if they could have improved the tech they would have had a proprietary tech and panel that was better than anything else currently available but they didn't for whatever reason???

 

[Steve Adams]

That’s why I own one of these, very small and light, designed to plug into the air and get all the ports you need

Still takes up extra space when we are packing only the essentials. If we are home it's fine. But space is at a premium with already carrying an extra drive and camera gear/batteries. One less thing.

 

[1BadManVan]

Still takes up extra space when we are packing only the essentials. If we are home it's fine. But space is at a premium with already carrying an extra drive and camera gear/batteries. One less thing.

sounds more like an excuse than an actual reason but you do you man. As long as you're happy with you current laptop, no need to be justifying it lol

 

[Steve Adams]

sounds more like an excuse than an actual reason but you do you man. As long as you're happy with you current laptop, no need to be justifying it lol

Oh I wasn't I was giving a valid reason why I would buy the Pro over the air. You are giving a valid reason why you are liking your air. You do you. I just don't want extra dongles. That's not an excuse to buy the pro over the air. That's a completely valid point. Oh, fans are nice to have when pushing workloads as well.

 

[Basic75]

16" is an aircraft carrier (as OP knows, of course, already).

ROFL. It's lighter than the 12" iBook G3.

 

[Basic75]

The term is called screen tearing when the slow response time causes text blurring.

Please, screen tearing has nothing to do with slow response times. These are two completely separate phenomena.

Screen tearing is when display refresh is switched to a new image in the middle of the frame. You see part of the old image and part of the new image with a "tear" between them. It most prominently happens in games when you "disable vsync", that is you disable only switching to a new image in the vertical blank.

Blurring due to slow response times is when the pixels in the display take a long time to change brightness. It's a property of the display panel technology, the display driver and the backlight modulation and can't just be "fixed" in software.

 

[daneoni]

Macs in general cause some eyestrain to me while i could work on windows for much longer...

I found 'Font Smoothing Adjuster' app and turned off font smoothing which turned out to be a game changer for me.

 

[maflynn]

Macs in general cause some eyestrain to me while i could work on windows for much longer.

I find the font rendering and/or resolution scaling to be inferior to windows and linux and yes, my eyes feel that effect if I put in extra hours on my Mac.

I have the same monitor hooked up to my work laptop (windows 11), M4 Max Studio, and my desktop running CachyOS via a KVM. The windows and Linux machines render everything with a level of crispness that doesn't give me eye strain, the same cannot be said for the Mac. Don't get me wrong, I love my Studio, its one of the best desktops I've ever owned, but resolution scaling in macos is something that is a sour point for me.

 

[ignatius345]

No reason to have MBP unless you know you’ll need the extra CPU-GPU-RAM it offer for your work.

I don’t know about that. A lot of people seem to like the super bright HDR display with ProMotion. It’s not just a question of raw speed and processor cooling.

 

[ctjack]

I found 'Font Smoothing Adjuster' app and turned off font smoothing which turned out to be a game changer for me.

Yeap, font smoothing off was a game changer when i discovered after struggling with 2012 retina mbp. Still not that great, but 70-80% better.

• At the command prompt, type the following: defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

 

[MacMorrison]

I found macOS text to be tiny on some resolutions... especially "non-native" apps like Microsoft Office where you have to turn the zoom up to 125% or more on most displays.

 

[boswald]

I find the font rendering and/or resolution scaling to be inferior to windows and linux and yes, my eyes feel that effect if I put in extra hours on my Mac.

I have the same monitor hooked up to my work laptop (windows 11), M4 Max Studio, and my desktop running CachyOS via a KVM. The windows and Linux machines render everything with a level of crispness that doesn't give me eye strain, the same cannot be said for the Mac. Don't get me wrong, I love my Studio, its one of the best desktops I've ever owned, but resolution scaling in macos is something that is a sour point for me.

It's interesting how we're all different. To me, macOS font rendering is the best I've seen. I had Windows 11 for years, and I couldn't stand its font rendering so I switched to Linux. By default it's terrible too, but Cachy seems to have applied patches or something to them to make it bearable.

 

[turbineseaplane]

ROFL. It's lighter than the 12" iBook G3.

Is it really relevant to compare something from a quarter century ago?

Would anyone ever do that with any other product category?

(No)

 

[ascender]

I prefer the screen and speakers on the 14" MacBook Pro, but if I much prefer typing on the Air and whilst there's not much difference in the weights on paper, the Air feels so much lighter thanks to its form factor.

The good thing now with Apple Silicon is that unless you need the power of the Pro or one of its features, you can buy an Air and you've still got a very capable machine.