Doesn't Apple support low-resolution external monitors (e.g. a 1920x1200 24" or a 2560x1440 27") just fine? And the problems are primarily if you need some kind of scaling between 1x and 2x?
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I am confused...
- Thread starter JW Pepper
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Windows didn't decide, the market did. Adequate and cheaper (a LOT cheaper) is a pretty big incentive.
The same market who made Apple the most profitable tech company in history? Sure, Microsoft wanted to be cheap and ubiquitous. But that's how you become redundant. Apple had high pixel density before they doubled it with Retina and ended up with 5K and 6K displays. Who's gonna complain Apple's displays are too nice?
You are correct. It's just that we live in the era of 4K and wide screens and these form factors happen to be not very suitable for Apple.
Well, most of us here are consumers not AAPL investors. Also, most Apple profits come from iPhones and Apple watches not Macs. And in Macs - it's mostly the laptops. Their desktops are generally a market failure and who knows if their poor monitor support has a role in this (there are definitely other factors in play as well).
I'm not sure that's true anymore, but yeah, the same market, mostly. More high end than consumer though.
And the most computers, and not redundant anytime soon. They brought computing to the masses, and that can't be overlooked because they still do.
I got into Macs because of how they handled all sorts of monitors, but that's no longer the case unfortunately. Those monitors you're talking about aren't too nice, they're too expensive for well over 90% of the market. I wont even spend that much on a monitor. It wouldn't be worth the money.
What you don't seem to understand is that "Microsoft" doesn't drive the Windows ecosystem.
They put high-DPI displays on their Surface products for years and years. So they agree with you. They introduced lots of APIs (that developers probably don't use) for making scalable interfaces, so the nuts and bolts are there.
But what do you want them to do to actually drive adoption? Make Windows 12 unable to boot unless you have at least 200DPI on your primary monitor? If you do THAT, the market will just stick to Windows 11 until the end of time.
Microsoft does not decide what hardware is used in Windowsland; Dell, Lenovo, HP, and co, along with grumpy jaded corporate IT buyers with a ton of older software to support, do.
Lenovo, for example, happily offered an optional 3840x2160 4K screen in most of their business laptops. I suspect that less than 5% of their buyers picked that option.
So, again, what do you want them to do? Do you want Lenovo to say "oh, well, we'll ONLY offer the 4K screen that no one except Gudi on a Mac forum wants" even though it costs them $200 more? If all Lenovos have 4K screens and cost $200 more unnecessarily, then... congratulations, most of the market will buy Dells and HPs with normal resolution screens and $200 less.
Apple, in late 2013, can say "going forward, if you want a 15" Mac laptop, it will be retina whether you like it or not, so open up your wallet and you're getting a high-DPI screen." And then a few years later, they can do the same thing with the other screen sizes.
Part of the problem is that Apple makes it hard to build a third-party ecosystem for monitors.
The iMacs come with built-in monitors and presumably almost no one plugs a second monitor into them. The Mac mini is intended to be cheap - who is going to go and spend big dollars on a 5K/6K high-DPI display for those? Presumably the overwhelming majority of laptops get used without external displays. And the Mac Pro is a teeny, teeny market... for which Apple does offer a funky high-end monitor.
So, where is the market for nice, Mac/retina-friendly monitors?
Doesn't help, too, that most of the high-end non-gamer monitors are sold under brands like Dell, Lenovo, etc. PC OEMs with the infrastructure to offer serious business-grade warranties. None of whom are particularly interested, I would think, at selling standalone monitors to Mac buyers.
Who are the main non-PC-OEM sellers of higher-end monitors? LG and Samsung? LG has sold good monitors for Mac in the past...
Maybe the rise of the Mac studio will change that. I presume you saw Dell's 32" 6K announcement last week? (I still think that a 32" iMac/iMac Pro/something will be coming using the same panel)
Well, "4K" on computers has always struck me as marketing idiocy... just like a decade ago, they used "full HD" to justify chopping off the bottom 10% from 1920x1200 monitors and turning them into 1920x1080. The further away TV buzzwords like "full HD", "4K", "HDMI", resolutions measured in numbers of vertical lines only (like people talking about "1440p" computer gaming), etc stay from computers, the better.
The problem is that moving to a resolution-independent world is tricky. Microsoft set out to support infinitely-many scaling factors... and struggled to get developers to update code/libraries/etc in way that would handle 125-175% scaling nicely. So they're stuck. And double-stuck because their traumatized user base doesn't want to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's improved in the 2020s.
Apple decided to solve that problem by coming up with the clever 2x trick. No arbitrary scaling, no anything, just if you have a retina screen, the OS doubles all your graphics for you until you provide new 2x-scaled graphics yourself. The beauty of the 2x trick is that within a few months of shipping retina screens, they had most of the third-party ecosystem supporting it. Even people like Microsoft, I think, supported retina-grade icons in a patch for Office 2011.
But the problem with the 2x approach is that it is quite challenging to do a 2x screen that, not doubled, would be greater than 1920x1080. And so you have... three options? The 27" iMac/LG screen, the new 32" panel Dell is using, and the Pro Display XDR? Anything else?
As for wide-screens, do you mean things like my 34" 3440x1440 monitors? Are there any stupid-high-resolution-but-not-high-enough-to-be-retina 21:9 monitors on the market?
Not sure what you consider wide screen but my NEC 32” 4K works really well with my Studio Ultra.
I know that on the PC side of things the laptop-desktop ratio is also 4 to 1. Apple's desktops sell just normal.
It isn't. Fortunately laptop buyers (80% of the market) get their monitor included and so do iMac buyers. It's really only the Mac mini, which is kind of affordable and doesn't come with a display.
I have a Mac Mini and a Mac Studio sitting right next to me and not an Apple monitor in sight...
Sure, but that’s the catch: if you build it yourself and know which components to use. I have no idea what NH-D15 is (I get that it’s a fan, of course) and I wouldn’t have any clue which parts to use to get a quiet system. But ok, I guess I could research it. I had a HP Omen desktop and that thing was really loud. I now have a custom built PC, but I have a stock cooler and it’s also quite loud. So, basically, if you want to get a quiet PC hassle free (not everyone wants to build their own system, troubleshoot it, etc), you’re probably out of luck. And that’s if you want a desktop - if you want a laptop (and I mostly use laptops), things are even worse.
It’s just that PC manufacturers are in a performance arms race with one another and have different priorities compared to Apple.
Erm, Apple did not drop support for low-ppi displays. Ultrawide screens also work with no problems.
As for the Microsoft approach, even in 2023. I’m getting inconsistent results when running Windows 11 in 4K. It’s a lot better than before, but it’s still messy.
That's correct, they still work, somewhat. What Apple did was get rid of antialiasing. So my 4K 32" monitor shows text as jagged. Most of the time it doesn't bother me, but occasionally...
What's weird, is anything in Google Chrome looks a heck of a lot better than any Mac text on my Mac Studio.
There's also another problem that seems more of a bug than dropping support -- occasionally the screen turns off for a few seconds and then comes back when I using it with my Mac. It doesn't do it with my Wibdows PC or my Intel Mac Mini. (I use a KVM)
You should not be seeing actual jagged text on a 4K monitor. Are you using any of the “looks like” display modes? Those all render to a higher resolution and then scale down to fit the 4K display. That is how they do the antialiasing. If you choose “looks like 1080p” that is 2:1 then the text and images will be pretty large on a 32”. If you choose “looks like 1440p” you will get 1.5:1 and the sizes will be more realistic at the cost of a very slight loss of sharpness due to the half pixel scaling. I use that on a 4K 27” and it is very useful and you can read very small text.
What Apple dropped was sub pixel antialiasing. That was the old way of antialiasing used in non-retina displays. Without it, an native 1080 display may look a little soft.
No, not using any "Looks like" resolutions, just the default and the text size the second biggest.
I guess in Ventura they have changed some of the descriptions. Default for a 4K display is 1920x1080. That should produce large text that is smooth without any jagged pixels using the full resolution of the 4K display. I would recommend the 2560x1440 mode for more realistic text sizes. There are a couple of other scaled sizes between that and native 4K that might work with OK your 32” display. All of these are antialiased using the method of rendering at a high resolution layout and then downscaling to 4K.
There are some other display modes available but you may need a 3rd party app to select them.
I really don't know, not my expertise, and not enough of a worry to figure it out. But I definitely see jaggy fonts and that's without good vision. I had a 27" screen before and I don't remember the jaggies then. I don't think it's the monitor, it looks good otherwise. (Though it's not really bright enough for 4K UHD.)
I see now that I have the largest text selected these days. This is the display prefs:
If I change it to list, I have the default selected. 1920x1080
Yes, if you hover over those selections it will show the specific resolution. You are at 1920x1080. That is a virtual resolution That really is about the size of elements on the screen. The physical resolution is your 4K screen at 3840 × 2160. The text is rendered using that full 3840 × 2160 resolution. 32” is on the large size for 4K in that it starts to be possible to discern pixels if you look closely but you shouldn’t really be seeing anything “jaggy”. Jaggy is where you can see hard edged pixels on the edges of things like text. You shouldn’t be seeing that.
If that screenshot is from your screen, does it resemble what you see? I see no jaggy text there. I see a little fuzziness but that may be an artifact of uploading to MR and resizing the image.
No, i didn't take the screenshot from the Mac, I took it remotely via Splashtop on my Windows laptop.