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

TheralSadurns said:
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.
Click to expand...

1920x1200p effective at 15" would make everything tiny. 17" it would be fine, but we don't have a 17" model, heck it'd fit more on an 18" model with how Apple seems to be targeting their desired UI scale.

I think Apple is hitting a pretty good DPI with these new screens. (Only gripe I have is I'll probably never memorize these crazy odd numbers they are using, but that's rather minor)

Hopefully Apple moves the Air line to 2880x1800 screens to also be similar in DPI in the future.
 
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reallynotnick said:
1920x1200p effective at 15" would make everything tiny. 17" it would be fine, but we don't have a 17" model, heck it'd fit more on an 18" model with how Apple seems to be targeting their desired UI scale.

I think Apple is hitting a pretty good DPI with these new screens. (Only gripe I have is I'll probably never memorize these crazy odd numbers they are using, but that's rather minor)

Hopefully Apple moves the Air line to 2880x1800 screens to also be similar in DPI in the future.
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The max setting on the current 16" MBP is already HIGHER than 1200p and it's fine... size-wise. It's just not native.
 
chucker23n1 said:
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.

View attachment 1844727

View attachment 1844729
View attachment 1844731

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.
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Actually... the rendering in macOS does work better... because it will always render ALL UI elements at double the pixel... then downsample. While Windows's scaling is a mixed back... where windows or certain UI elements are not scaled and keep their original size. This is especially true with 3rd party applications.
 
chucker23n1 said:
I'm not sure there's much more explaining needed than multiple posts and screenshots.



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.

View attachment 1846800


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:

View attachment 1846803

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.
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I think we are just talking about different aspects of the displays. I was talking about choosing non-integer resolutions on a display. You are talking about choosing different dpi settings? I have no interest in what Windows is doing. Not trying to dump on your posts.
 
Please let it be an October media event, not November... pleeeeeeease, Apple?.... (Because asking sweetly on MR will definitely have an effect.) I need a new machine and I have a feeling the wait between purchase and shipping will be long.
 
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TheralSadurns said:
The max setting on the current 16" MBP is already HIGHER than 1200p and it's fine... size-wise. It's just not native.
Click to expand...
And yet how many people use it at that mode? Obviously there won't be a one size fits all solution, but you'd be in the minority going for 300ppi with 2x scaling.

Apple's goal is to provide perfect 2x scaling to most users and these new screens will do that. I'm not against them offering a higher res BTO option, but I think it'd be a mistake to make it standard.
 
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None of the default resolutions on my 13" MBA are "2x" and I don't notice any lack of sharpness (running at 1680 x 1050).

Screenshot 2021-09-27 at 10.09.43 CEST.png

MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2020) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com support.apple.com
 
chucker23n1 said:
1280x800 is exactly 2x. The scaled resolutions will look slightly blurrier.
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I can't compare, as 1280 x 800 isn't a resolution that can be selected (without using some third party tool).

Edit: It was pointed out that I can pick a lower resolution that "default" and that is exactly 1280x800. Every day is a school day.
 
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adrianlondon said:
I can't compare, as 1280 x 800 isn't a resolution that can be selected (without using some third party tool).
Click to expand...

JibApps Displays is cheap and works wonders. There's also a free trial. Even if you don't run Displays all the time, I recommend you install it to play around freely with alternative resolutions. There's also a built-in night mode and a screenshot utility which can be useful.

PS. I do wish JibApps had used a more specific name as it's almost impossible to find Displays in search. I had to get the link from About Displays.
 
adrianlondon said:
I can't compare, as 1280 x 800 isn't a resolution that can be selected (without using some third party tool).
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure you can, just select one bigger than default (1440x900) and it'll be 1280x800. The tech specs you linked only list scaled resolutions, 1280x800 is native res so it would not be listed as scaled hence its missing.

728A9DCC-38E9-4801-9BBE-EA4A90C27106.png
 
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reallynotnick said:
I'm pretty sure you can, just select one bigger than default (1440x900) and it'll be 1280x800. The tech specs you linked only list scaled resolutions, 1280x800 is native res so it would be listed as scaled hence its missing.

View attachment 1849816
Click to expand...

You're right! I just assumed if "default" wasn't a 2x resolution, none of them would be.

Wow, everything looks so BIG.

It doesn't look any sharper than the "More Space" I usually use, but my eyes aren't what they used to be and I wear reading glasses to deal with all that extra resolution.
 
adrianlondon said:
You're right! I just assumed if "default" wasn't a 2x resolution, none of them would be.

Wow, everything looks so BIG.

It doesn't look any sharper than the "More Space" I usually use, but my eyes aren't what they used to be and I wear reading glasses to deal with all that extra resolution.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's something the first post talks about is that Apple has the default on all these laptops not set to 2x, so these new MBPs with a higher PPI will allow default to be a perfect 2x.
 
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