Upcoming 14-Inch and 16-Inch MacBook Pro Display Resolutions Likely Revealed in Latest macOS Monterey Beta

[chucker23n1]

If UI elements are snapped to the pixel grid, then the rendered result is simply wrong. "Pixel-perfect" is an oxymoron if the logical pixels and physicals pixels don't overlap precisely. But again, Windows has the tradition to render it's UI wrong in order to achieve "sharpness", even if it looks awful.

This is true for text rendering (where Windows traditionally favors rendering to the grid, and macOS traditionally favors rendering accurately), but I think it misses the larger point that Apple ultimately has no solution, when Microsoft has a flawed one.

Here's a window at 100%, 125%, and 175%, respectively. The screen resolution remains the same; the display just uses its native resolution.

There are some flaws (which is embarrassing; how many more years does Microsoft need to get this right?) — the system icon in the top right doesn't seem to scale correctly, for example. But the entire window layout does get scaled.

Apple briefly experimented with this, but it was buggy enough that they eventually dropped the idea altogether in favor of only allowing 1x, 2x, and 3x.

If I buy a $300 24-inch 4K display, I can simply set it to 150% and have a workable solution. On macOS, I can't — I could set, say, "looks like 1440p" and have macOS downsample from that, and maybe it'll look fine, but it won't be as sharp as the above.

 

[aTomek]

And the screens use a DIFFERENT ASPECT RATIO! It is approximately 15.4:10, which is different from the 16:10 current MacBooks use.

Which is even better. I only hope it will be as compact as current Macbook Air, and its fans will turn on only under high load.

 

[aTomek]

Does it mean that with higher DPI fonts will be smaller than in current Macbooks? What about pages in browser? Will they be smaller on same 100% zoom?

 

[chucker23n1]

Does it mean that with higher DPI fonts will be smaller than in current Macbooks? What about pages in browser? Will they be smaller on same 100% zoom?

No. The effective DPI remains the same, as the default configuration was already on the higher DPI.

 

[ajfahey]

parallels has a version for M1 Macs.

So far they do but it’s dependent on an unofficial, ARM insiders release of Microsoft WIN-10.

 

[leman]

This is true for text rendering (where Windows traditionally favors rendering to the grid, and macOS traditionally favors rendering accurately), but I think it misses the larger point that Apple ultimately has no solution, when Microsoft has a flawed one.

I know what you mean. It is true that Apple doesn't give you as many choices. Their solution works well only for a certain range of resolutions and certain PPIs, before interpolation artifacts become apparent...

 

[Tagbert]

Why can't they do just 4K, the resolution is already close to that and 4K is an industry standard... also with M1 chips I'm sure there won't be any issues with the battery

I'd rather be able to see watch true 4K content on my display, not this sub 4K weird resolution...

4K is an awkward resolution for screens of this size. It's also that weird video-only 16:9 aspect ratio that doesn't work well for documents. 16:9 is good for TVs but not for laptops.

If you run 4K at 1:1 the UI elements are too small.
If you run 4K at 2:1 for 2x Retina, the addressable resolution is 1080p which looks too chunky.

Apple has targeted these to be good at a 2x Retina resolution for maximum sharpness and good detail.

 

[macsplusmacs]

the hardest decision of the year: 14 or 16??

For me it comes down to this.

Do both have same options / specs?

If so 14.

If not. I have to go 16". I want all the GPUs I can get.

 

[Janichsan]

macOS doesn’t have fractional scale factors.

Another thing where Apple is behind the curve.

 

[Tagbert]

-

 

[Tagbert]

If they did make it 4K, they’d have to either scale it way down (which kind of makes going with a higher res moot?) or up to 3x.

macOS doesn’t have fractional scale factors.

In what way is this true?

They may use 2x and 3x when they render in the background, but then that result is scaled to fit the chosen resolution which are often fractionally scaled. You can choose several different "looks like" resolutions. You get the full smoothing of a 3x source sized to fit your chosen display resolution. I use a 27" 4K monitor set to 2560x1440. Works well. What else do you want?

 

[chucker23n1]

In what way is this true?

They may use 2x and 3x when they render in the background, but then that result is scaled to fit the chosen resolution which are often fractionally scaled. You can choose several different "looks like" resolutions. You get the full smoothing of a 3x source sized to fit your chosen display resolution. I use a 27" 4K monitor set to 2560x1440. Works well. What else do you want?

Upcoming 14-Inch and 16-Inch MacBook Pro Display Resolutions Likely Revealed in Latest macOS Monterey Beta

This is true for text rendering (where Windows traditionally favors rendering to the grid, and macOS traditionally favors rendering accurately), but I think it misses the larger point that Apple ultimately has no solution, when Microsoft has a flawed one. Here's a window at 100%, 125%, and...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Lol, 15.4:10 is more vertical height than 16:10. If it makes it easier for you 15.4:10 is the same as 16:10.4

My bad. And hallelujah!!

 

[Tagbert]

Upcoming 14-Inch and 16-Inch MacBook Pro Display Resolutions Likely Revealed in Latest macOS Monterey Beta

This is true for text rendering (where Windows traditionally favors rendering to the grid, and macOS traditionally favors rendering accurately), but I think it misses the larger point that Apple ultimately has no solution, when Microsoft has a flawed one. Here's a window at 100%, 125%, and...

forums.macrumors.com

That doesn’t really explain much. Mostly just talks about Windows scaling and says vague things about Mac OS. At the current dpis of screens a scaled resolution setting is plenty clear and clean. Back when screens were 72/96 dpi, the aliasing of a scaled screen was very noticeable, now at 250dpi it is nearly undetectable.

 

[foliovision]

I'd rather be able to see watch true 4K content on my display, not this sub 4K weird resolution...

I imagine you'd be happy paying another $200 or $300 for a laptop with even more pixels and pixel density. The size that Apple chose probably balances cost and quality very well. It's probably not just cost thought....

Most of us buy MacBook Pros to work. 2/1 retina at the right size for the screen size is a boon. These odd screen sizes look very well engineered. 1728x1117 at 16 inches diameter is just right. Moreover, the 3:2 ratio is very good for video editing where one needs to see the video and have lots of space for timelines and control panels.

 

[JedTheFish]

All I care about is Thunderbolt ports. USBC ports a second priority. Raise your hand if you’ve noticed a dramatic increase in peripherals demanding a direct connection with no hub. You can have the other 23 pixels per inch. It’s all about what they play nice with.

 

[macsplusmacs]

All I care about is Thunderbolt ports. USBC ports a second priority. Raise your hand if you’ve noticed a dramatic increase in peripherals demanding a direct connection with no hub. You can have the other 23 pixels per inch. It’s all about what they play nice with.

Some of these hubs are now providing 90w of power. Is the direct connection still needed even if that's the case?

(is looking for a powered hub to solve this issue)

 

[TheralSadurns]

4K is an awkward resolution for screens of this size. It's also that weird video-only 16:9 aspect ratio that doesn't work well for documents. 16:9 is good for TVs but not for laptops.

If you run 4K at 1:1 the UI elements are too small.
If you run 4K at 2:1 for 2x Retina, the addressable resolution is 1080p which looks too chunky.

Apple has targeted these to be good at a 2x Retina resolution for maximum sharpness and good detail.

That's completely wrong... in so many ways.
And obviously... when people, myself included... talk about 4+ on a MBP... we mean the 16:10 equivalent resolution!
aka 3840x2400.
And how would that look chunky on a MBP?
The old 17" MBP has a 1200p display and the highest PPI of any Mac at that time.
Heck... the HIGHEST native available scaling setting on a current 16" MBP that gives you the biggest canvas when talking about POINTS is 2048x1280 which is actually pretty darn close to 1920x1200.
Which... if the display WERE 4k... would have the benefit of actually scaling properly. Because all of these NON-integer scaling methods create some weird issues... when lines rendered at 1pt... have to be rendered at EITHER 1px or 2px thickness... which will change while scrolling resulting in a weird flicker.

When talking JUST about the display... the new Dell XPS 15 with it's OLED display is kicking the MBP's butt... not that I'd want an OLED display... but it DOES tick all the right boxes... and does the scaling correctly. It's just that the subpar Windows OS is a dealbreaker.

 

[TheralSadurns]

4K is an awkward resolution for screens of this size. It's also that weird video-only 16:9 aspect ratio that doesn't work well for documents. 16:9 is good for TVs but not for laptops.

If you run 4K at 1:1 the UI elements are too small.
If you run 4K at 2:1 for 2x Retina, the addressable resolution is 1080p which looks too chunky.

Apple has targeted these to be good at a 2x Retina resolution for maximum sharpness and good detail.

Down voting me while providing no arguments whatsoever just goes to show how clueless you are.

 

[foliovision]

The old 17" MBP has a 1200p display and the highest PPI of any Mac at that time.

Yes, it does. I have two of them. You would not want to go higher than the old 17 inch in PPI. Native Retina (2x) is much better than variations. Photo apps only run properly at 2x Retina (otherwise you don't get one to one pixels, although theoretically it should be possible to have the interface at an odd ratio and the actual photo pixels remain 1:1, I've tested this on a MBP 16" as well as 4K monitors attached to a Mac Pro).

Speaking of the 17" and its 1920 x 1200 screen – that aspect 16:10 aspect ratio is far preferable for work than any 16:9 aspect ratio. The 16" MBP is also 16:10, thank heavens, not overly wide and not tall enough, unlike most of those ridiculous windows gamers laptops. The MBP line is supposed to be for creating things and doing work, and not content consumption. MBP pricing reflects pro and productive use, not recreation.

People who do creative work largely have high quality projectors or 4K televisions which are far more competitively priced, even with an Apple TV or Roku 4K and high quality cable thrown in. Although sticklers for visual quality will have at least a blu-ray if not an UHD blu-ray (not enough content available to necessarily make one worthwhile) as the shadows on web compressed or even most torrented video are noisy and along with the banding on large similar areas of colour.

 

[chucker23n1]

That doesn’t really explain much.

I'm not sure there's much more explaining needed than multiple posts and screenshots.

Mostly just talks about Windows scaling and says vague things about Mac OS. At the current dpis of screens a scaled resolution setting is plenty clear and clean. Back when screens were 72/96 dpi, the aliasing of a scaled screen was very noticeable, now at 250dpi it is nearly undetectable.

macOS can do 72 dpi (1x), 144 dpi (2x) or 216 dpi (3x, which I'm not sure has actually been attempted on macOS, so maybe it can't do that).

There were versions of Tiger and Leopard (maybe also Snow Leopard?) that also supported fractional settings, such as 1.5x. You could even go down to, say, 0.8x.

This support was limited to developers and considered not ready for users, but developers were vaguely told to start preparing their apps.

However, this was hard to get right in practice — including for Apple itself. For example, here's TextEdit at 1x:

It's especially hard when you have fractional values.

Fractional support never shipped, and instead, around the same time, the iPhone 4 appeared, which supported 2x scaling. Then some later iPhone (the iPhone 6 Plus, maybe?) did 3x scaling. This is much easier, as you can, when in doubt, just render a logical pixel as 2x2 or 3x3 physical pixels.

Windows has since the 1990s supported a similar feature, although it never worked really well. It also didn't support different dpis per screen for the longest time (until 8.1, I believe). In recent years, though, it has gotten a lot better.

Going back to the original topic: suppose you do put a 4K display in a 16-inch laptop. On Windows, this means it'll probably default to 250% scaling. For apps that do scaling well (which is an ever-increasing amount), it'll look great. (Although, personally, I'd argue it won't really look noticeably better than what Apple does — just put a display in there that's natively around 220 ppi.) On macOS, it won't. What macOS could do is render towards a virtual resolution that's a lot higher than 4K, then downsample that back to 4K. This will be blurry. Not very blurry, but blurry nonetheless.

For laptops, this really isn't a problem: Apple will simply put a good native resolution in there. But as soon as you want an external display, this is a huge problem, because it vastly limits good display choices. If macOS supported something like 1.5x, you could simply get a 20-inch or 24-inch 4K display and use that.

But I'm guesing you'll reply to this with "that doesn't really explain much" again, so maybe I shouldn't have bothered.

 

[chucker23n1]

That's completely wrong... in so many ways.
And obviously... when people, myself included... talk about 4+ on a MBP... we mean the 16:10 equivalent resolution!
aka 3840x2400.
And how would that look chunky on a MBP?

You haven't explained how a 4K display would be better. (It wouldn't. On macOS, it would be worse, because it can't natively scale to that in a useful way.)

Down voting me while providing no arguments whatsoever just goes to show how clueless you are.

Maybe don't start a post with "That's completely wrong in so many ways", then?

 

[TheralSadurns]

Yes, it does. I have two of them. You would not want to go higher than the old 17 inch in PPI. Native Retina (2x) is much better than variations. Photo apps only run properly at 2x Retina (otherwise you don't get one to one pixels, although theoretically it should be possible to have the interface at an odd ratio and the actual photo pixels remain 1:1, I've tested this on a MBP 16" as well as 4K monitors attached to a Mac Pro).

Speaking of the 17" and its 1920 x 1200 screen – that aspect 16:10 aspect ratio is far preferable for work than any 16:9 aspect ratio. The 16" MBP is also 16:10, thank heavens, not overly wide and not tall enough, unlike most of those ridiculous windows gamers laptops. The MBP line is supposed to be for creating things and doing work, and not content consumption. MBP pricing reflects pro and productive use, not recreation.

People who do creative work largely have high quality projectors or 4K televisions which are far more competitively priced, even with an Apple TV or Roku 4K and high quality cable thrown in. Although sticklers for visual quality will have at least a blu-ray if not an UHD blu-ray (not enough content available to necessarily make one worthwhile) as the shadows on web compressed or even most torrented video are noisy and along with the banding on large similar areas of colour.

Um... that is EXACTLY what I am saying. Word for word.
The resolution in POINTS of the 17" MBP was basically perfect. 1200p, aka the 16:10 variant of FullHD.
What I am saying is... that the 16" MBP should move to the 16:10 equivalent of 4k... with a resolution of 3840x2400px to enable true 2x retina move rendered at 1200p. Giving you a true integer value so you have a 1 to 1 pixel mapping.

 

[TheralSadurns]

You haven't explained how a 4K display would be better. (It wouldn't. On macOS, it would be worse, because it can't natively scale to that in a useful way.)



Maybe don't start a post with "That's completely wrong in so many ways", then?

Yes of course. It all depends on the display SIZE.
For notebooks 15-17" 4k is perfect so you have a clean scaling factor of 2 to render a desktop at 1200p.

For desktop displays 4k is ideal with a size of 21-24"... for true 2:1 scaling.
Which is also exactly the reason that Apple is opting for 5k at 27" aka 4 times the resolution of the old Cinema and Thunderbolt Displays... to have a 2560x1440 POINTS canvas (16:9 in that case).

That way nothing is too small or too large. And EVERY UI element is rendered cleanly at all times. A hairline rendered at 1pt will be displayed using exactly 2px.
If you had a scaling factor of 1.5... a 1pt thick line would be rendered at either 1px or 2px and change that behavior while moving on the display (scrolling etc.), resulting in a flickering line.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

I always had my 16” (and other retina MBPs I’ve owned) set to 2x. I never found it “uncomfortably large”. Even if it meant losing screen real estate. I couldn’t stand the fuzzy less sharp default setting that MBPs shipped with. It will be nice to have more screen space now at 2x.