Why at maximum brightness, screen of M5 Pro MacBook Pro 16" looked similar to that of M5 Air 15"?

[hajime]

Hello, asked a few people in different Apple stores but they could not provide a satisfactory answer. On paper the MacBook Pro 16" M5 Pro has a SDR brightness of up 1000 nits and that of the M5 Air 15" has 500 nits. When I placed them side by side next to the windows (on a not too sunny day with True Tone OFF), they looked similar when viewin text in editors. Same thing in the Apple store. One staff just said that brightness in nits does not scale proportionally to preceived brightness. He said that the MacBook Pro 16" M5 Pro is about 15-20% brighter rather than two times brighter than the Air. How does this work?

 

[DHagan4755]

On paper the MacBook Pro is twice as bright (1,000 vs 500 nits), but your eyes don’t see brightness linearly, so it just looks noticeably brighter—not double. What does stand out is the Pro’s mini-LED display, which gives you deeper blacks and punchier highlights, so the whole image looks richer, not just brighter.

 

[hajime]

On paper the MacBook Pro is twice as bright (1,000 vs 500 nits), but your eyes don’t see brightness linearly, so it just looks noticeably brighter—not double. What does stand out is the Pro’s mini-LED display, which gives you deeper blacks and punchier highlights, so the whole image looks richer, not just brighter.

Thanks. I think in the best case, in one Apple store maybe 5-10% brighter but no more than that. In several BestBuy stores, they looked the same. I forgot to check the setting of True Tone. Probably On by default.

At home, I turned off True Tone on both machines and tested them when the screens were facing the windows. Another thing could be that the Pro's white is more like having a color temperature of 6500K and looked whiter. On the Air, the color temperature is different. Even I manually adjusted the color temperature to 6500K, the Pro's screen still looked a bit whiter.

When displaying videos, I could tell that the PRO's screen is better. The colors are more vibrant and things are more detailed. However, I mainly use the machine for writing and programming. So I am more concerned in brightness when used next to windows or under the sky.

Not sure if it is true, I think somewhere I read that the extra brightness is activated only when HDR videos are played or when the laptop is used under the sun on sunny days. Can anybody confirm that? When I had both machines, there was no sunny days for me to test.

 

[DHagan4755]

Here's the other very important detail: The MacBook Pro only goes up to 600 nits in normal lighting. It only cranks up to 1,000 nits in very bright environments, like outside on a sunny day.

 

[hajime]

Here's the other very important detail: The MacBook Pro only goes up to 600 nits in normal lighting. It only cranks up to 1,000 nits in very bright environments, like outside on a sunny day.

Do you think probably it was not sunny enough to see a different between the Air and Pro?

 

[DHagan4755]

Yeah unless it's outdoors in bright sunlight you're not going to notice much of a difference between the two. And when you can have both the Air & Pro outside on a sunny day the difference in brightness should be stark, especially if you have the Pro model with the nano texture that is far better at rejecting reflections than standard glass.

 

[hajime]

Thank you