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The hardware is great, but the software is lacking. macOS only supports resolution-based scaling which makes anything but the default 200% pixel scaling mode lo

The hardware is great, but the software is lacking. macOS only supports resolution-based scaling which makes anything but the default 200% pixel scaling mode look bad. For example, with a 27" 4K display many users will want to use 150% or 175% scaling to get enough real estate, but the image will look blurry because macOS renders at a higher resolution and then downscales to the 4K resolution of the screen. Both Windows and Linux (Wayland) support scaling the UI itself, and with their support for sub-pixel anti-aliasing (that macOS also lacks) this makes text look a lot more crisp.

presbyterian 7mo ago
> For example, with a 27" 4K display many users will want to use 150% or 175% scaling to get enough real estate, but the image will look blurry I use a Mac with a monitor with these specs (a Dell of some kind, I don't know the model number off the top of my head), at 150% scaling, and it's not blurry at all.
- arndt 7mo ago
  I also feel it's just fine. Not as amazing as the Apple displays, but I'll have to sit really close to make out the difference for text.
jsheard 7mo ago
Yeah this is correct, I don't know why you're being downvoted. The decisions Apple made when pivoting their software stack to high-DPI resulted in Macs requiring ultra-dense displays for optimal results - that's a limitation of macOS, not an indictment of less dense displays, which Windows and Linux accommodate much better.
jonpurdy 7mo ago
This is correct and also increasingly affecting me as my eyes age. I had to give my Studio Display to my wife because my eyes can't focus at a reasonable distance anymore, and if I moved back further the text was too small to read. I ran the 5K Studio Display at 4K scaled for a bit but it was noticeably blurry. This would've been easily solved with non-integer scaling, if Apple had implemented that. (I now use a combo of 4K TV 48" from ~1.5-2 metres back as well as a 4K 27" screen from 1 m away, depending on which room I want to work in. Angular resolution works out similarly (115 pixels per degree).)
- LatencyKills 7mo ago
  Oh man... I'm in the same situation wrt eyesight. Are you coding on the 4K tv? I have enough space to make that configuration work. TIA
  - jonpurdy 7mo ago
    Yep, 4K is plenty of resolution for me running Sequoia. But running at simulated 1920x1080@2x, as at native 4K text would be way too small.
    - LatencyKills 7mo ago
      Thank you!
- giobox 7mo ago
  All through the 2000s Apple developed non-integer scaling support in various versions of MacOS X under the banner of “resolution independence” - the idea was to use vectors where possible rather than bitmaps so OS UI would look good at any resolution, including non-integer scaling factors. Some indie Mac developers even started implementing support for it in anticipation of it being officially enabled. The code was present in 10.4 through 10.6 and possibly later, although not enabled by default. Apple gave up on the idea sadly and integer scaling is where we are. Here’s a developer blog from 2006 playing with it: > https://redsweater.com/blog/223/resolution-independent-fever https://redsweater.com/blog/223/resolution-independent-fever There was even documentation for getting ready to support resolution independence on Apple’s developer portal at one stage, but I sadly can’t find it today. Here’s a news post from all the way back in 2004 discussing the in development feature in Mac OS tiger: > https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/45544/mac-os-x-tiger-to-support-resolution-independence-larger-icons#:~:text=Jump%20to%20First%20Reply,new%20%22scaling%20factor%22%20parameter. https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/45544/mac-os-x-ti... Lots of of folks (myself included!) in the Mac software world were really excited for it back then. It would have permitted you to scale the UI to totally arbitrary sizes while maintaining sharpness etc.
  - 7mo ago
Aurornis 7mo ago
> For example, with a 27" 4K display 4K pixels is not enough at 27" for Retina scaling. Apple uses 5K panels in their 27" displays for this reason. There are several very good 27" 5K monitors on the market now around $700 to $800. Not as cheap as the 4K monitors but you have to pay for the pixel density. There are also driver boards that let you convert 27" 5K iMacs into external monitors. I don't recommend this lightly because it's not an easy mod but it's within reason for the motivated Hacker News audience.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- MoonWalk 7mo ago
  If your Mac goes bad it can be worthwile. My friend gave me his pre-Retina 27" iMac, part of the circa-2008 generation of Macs whose GPUs all failed. I removed all the computing hardware but kept the Apple power supply, instead of using the cheapo one that came with the LCD driver board I bought. I was able to find the PWM specs for the panel, and installed a cheap PWM module with its own frequency & duty-cycle display to drive it and control brightness. The result is my daily desktop monitor. Spent way too much time on it, but it works great!
- BoredomIsFun 7mo ago
  Apple still uses ancient 450nm panel though, nowadays everyone and their dog moved to 455-460nm ones. 450nm considerably more harsh on my eyes.
badc0ffee 7mo ago
I would love to see examples of this. I have a MBP and a 24" 4K Dell monitor connected via HDMI. I use all kinds of scaled resolutions and I've never noticed anything being jagged or blurry. Meanwhile in Linux the scaling is generally good, but occasionally I'll run into some UI element that doesn't scale properly, or some application that has a tiny mouse cursor. And then Windows has serious problems with old apps - blurry as hell with a high DPI display. Subpixel antialiasing isn't something I miss on macOS because it seems pointless at these resolutions [0]. And I don't think it would work with OLED anyway because the subpixels are arranged differently than a typical conventional LCD. [0] I remember being excited by ClearType on Windows back in the day, and I did notice a difference. But there's no way I'd be able to discern it on a high DPI display; the conventional antialiasing macOS does is enough.
- EnPissant 7mo ago
  I have a Macbook pro and a Linux machine attached to my dual 4k monitors. Fonts on Linux (KDE Plasma on Wayland) look noticeably sharper than the Mac. I don't use subpixel rendering either. I hate that I have to use the Mac for work.
- chocochunks 7mo ago
  This [1] has good examples. 24" 4K is on the smaller side and so less noticeable than on larger displays like 27" or 32". [1] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/
- brailsafe 7mo ago
  I'm more surprised that you're using a 24" display at any resolution. Of course, everyone has different preferences, but that just seems ridiculously small considering how available larger displays are for the same ppi and refresh rate probably. I'm personally on the old 30" 16:10 2560x1600 form factor, and it's wildly better visually than the 27" 1440p screen by the same brand (all of them Dell) I use at the office.
  - badc0ffee 7mo ago
hollerith 7mo ago
Wayland supports it (and Chrome supports it very well) but GTK does not. I run my UI at 200% scaling because graphical Emacs uses GTK to draw text, and that text would be blurry if I ran at my preferred scaling factor of 150% or 175%.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
  GTK uses Pango/Harfbuzz and some other components to draw text, all of which are widely used in other Linux GUI stacks. GTK/GDK do not draw text themselves, so your complaints are not with them directly.
  - hollerith 7mo ago
    I'm not asseting that text is being rendered incorrectly. I'm asserting that after rendering, the text is being downsampled.
- gucci-on-fleek 7mo ago
  This works with GTK for me at least. I've been using Gnome+Wayland with 150% scaling for almost 4 years now, and I haven't noticed any issues with GTK. Actually, my experience is essentially backwards from yours—anything Electron/Chromium-based needed a bunch of command-line flags to work properly up until a few months ago, whereas GTK apps always just worked without any issues.
  - hollerith 7mo ago
    If you're using a high-DPI monitor, you might not notice the blurriness. I use a standard 110-DPI monitor (at 200% scaling in Gnome) and I notice it when the scaling factor is not an integer. Or more precisely, I noticed it eventually as a result of my being primed to notice it after people on this site insisted that GTK cannot handle fractional scaling factors. Compared to the contents of a browser's viewport, Emacs and the apps that come with Gnome are visually simple, so it took me a year or 2 to notice (even on a standard 110-DPI monitor used at 150% and 175% scaling) any blurriness in those apps since the app I'm most conditioned to notice blurriness is my browser, and Chrome's viewport is resolution independent except when rendering certain image formats -- text is always non-blurry. Yes, Chrome's entire window can be quite blurry if Xwayland is involved, but it now talks to Wayland by default and for years before that could be configured to talk Wayland, so I don't consider that worth talking about. If Xwayland is not involved, the contents of Chrome's viewport is non-blurry at all scaling factors except for the PNGs, JPGs, etc. For a long time, when run at a fractional scaling factor under Gnome (and configured to talk Wayland) the only part of Hacker News that was blurry was the "Y" logo in the top left corner, then about 2 years ago, that logo's PNG file was replaced with an SVG file and the final bit of blurriness on HN went away.
benbayard 7mo ago
I just tested on my 4k display and 150% and 175% were not blurry at all. I'm on a 32 inch 4k monitor. Is it possible this information is out of date and was fixed by more recent versions of macos?
- kinematikk 7mo ago
  Absolutely not fixed. Try to look on black text on white background. Its not very obvious but still a little annoying
  - benbayard 7mo ago
    Interesting, maybe it just doesn't bother me, because I do not notice it at all. I was looking at black text on a white background. Maybe it's less of an impact on Q-OLEDs with their pixel layout perhaps? I just checked and I actually run my ultra-wide monitor at 125% resolution and the text looks crisp. That one is a regular LED display but it does have really high pixel density (5120 x 2160, I run it at 3360x1418)
harr01 7mo ago
Have you ever seen a MacBook air's screen? Those use fractional scaling and look fine.
nailer 7mo ago
> macOS renders at a higher resolution and then downscales to the 4K resolution That seems weird to me. I remember 20 years ago one of the whole points of macOS version 10 was display PDF, i.e. a vector based UI.
- watersb 7mo ago
  While the original OS X display model, Quartz, evolved from Display PDF via NextStep, I believe that it shifted back to pixel rasterization to offload more of the display stack onto the GPU. Quartz Extreme? John Siracusa, Ars Technica: It's possible that existing consumer video cards could be coerced into doing efficient vector drawing in hardware. Apple tried to do just that in Tiger [note], but then had to back off at the last minute and disable the feature in the shipping version of the OS. It remains disabled to this day. [note] https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14 https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/04/3720/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/04/3720/

presbyterian 7mo ago

> For example, with a 27" 4K display many users will want to use 150% or 175% scaling to get enough real estate, but the image will look blurry I use a Mac with a monitor with these specs (a Dell of some kind, I don't know the model number off the top of my head), at 150% scaling, and it's not blurry at all.

arndt 7mo ago
I also feel it's just fine. Not as amazing as the Apple displays, but I'll have to sit really close to make out the difference for text.

jsheard 7mo ago

Yeah this is correct, I don't know why you're being downvoted. The decisions Apple made when pivoting their software stack to high-DPI resulted in Macs requiring ultra-dense displays for optimal results - that's a limitation of macOS, not an indictment of less dense displays, which Windows and Linux accommodate much better.

jonpurdy 7mo ago

This is correct and also increasingly affecting me as my eyes age. I had to give my Studio Display to my wife because my eyes can't focus at a reasonable distance anymore, and if I moved back further the text was too small to read. I ran the 5K Studio Display at 4K scaled for a bit but it was noticeably blurry. This would've been easily solved with non-integer scaling, if Apple had implemented that. (I now use a combo of 4K TV 48" from ~1.5-2 metres back as well as a 4K 27" screen from 1 m away, depending on which room I want to work in. Angular resolution works out similarly (115 pixels per degree).)

LatencyKills 7mo ago
Oh man... I'm in the same situation wrt eyesight. Are you coding on the 4K tv? I have enough space to make that configuration work. TIA
- jonpurdy 7mo ago
  Yep, 4K is plenty of resolution for me running Sequoia. But running at simulated 1920x1080@2x, as at native 4K text would be way too small.
  - LatencyKills 7mo ago
    Thank you!
giobox 7mo ago
All through the 2000s Apple developed non-integer scaling support in various versions of MacOS X under the banner of “resolution independence” - the idea was to use vectors where possible rather than bitmaps so OS UI would look good at any resolution, including non-integer scaling factors. Some indie Mac developers even started implementing support for it in anticipation of it being officially enabled. The code was present in 10.4 through 10.6 and possibly later, although not enabled by default. Apple gave up on the idea sadly and integer scaling is where we are. Here’s a developer blog from 2006 playing with it: > https://redsweater.com/blog/223/resolution-independent-fever https://redsweater.com/blog/223/resolution-independent-fever There was even documentation for getting ready to support resolution independence on Apple’s developer portal at one stage, but I sadly can’t find it today. Here’s a news post from all the way back in 2004 discussing the in development feature in Mac OS tiger: > https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/45544/mac-os-x-tiger-to-support-resolution-independence-larger-icons#:~:text=Jump%20to%20First%20Reply,new%20%22scaling%20factor%22%20parameter. https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/45544/mac-os-x-ti... Lots of of folks (myself included!) in the Mac software world were really excited for it back then. It would have permitted you to scale the UI to totally arbitrary sizes while maintaining sharpness etc.
- 7mo ago

Aurornis 7mo ago

> For example, with a 27" 4K display 4K pixels is not enough at 27" for Retina scaling. Apple uses 5K panels in their 27" displays for this reason. There are several very good 27" 5K monitors on the market now around $700 to $800. Not as cheap as the 4K monitors but you have to pay for the pixel density. There are also driver boards that let you convert 27" 5K iMacs into external monitors. I don't recommend this lightly because it's not an easy mod but it's within reason for the motivated Hacker News audience.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
MoonWalk 7mo ago
If your Mac goes bad it can be worthwile. My friend gave me his pre-Retina 27" iMac, part of the circa-2008 generation of Macs whose GPUs all failed. I removed all the computing hardware but kept the Apple power supply, instead of using the cheapo one that came with the LCD driver board I bought. I was able to find the PWM specs for the panel, and installed a cheap PWM module with its own frequency & duty-cycle display to drive it and control brightness. The result is my daily desktop monitor. Spent way too much time on it, but it works great!
BoredomIsFun 7mo ago
Apple still uses ancient 450nm panel though, nowadays everyone and their dog moved to 455-460nm ones. 450nm considerably more harsh on my eyes.

badc0ffee 7mo ago

I would love to see examples of this. I have a MBP and a 24" 4K Dell monitor connected via HDMI. I use all kinds of scaled resolutions and I've never noticed anything being jagged or blurry. Meanwhile in Linux the scaling is generally good, but occasionally I'll run into some UI element that doesn't scale properly, or some application that has a tiny mouse cursor. And then Windows has serious problems with old apps - blurry as hell with a high DPI display. Subpixel antialiasing isn't something I miss on macOS because it seems pointless at these resolutions [0]. And I don't think it would work with OLED anyway because the subpixels are arranged differently than a typical conventional LCD. [0] I remember being excited by ClearType on Windows back in the day, and I did notice a difference. But there's no way I'd be able to discern it on a high DPI display; the conventional antialiasing macOS does is enough.

EnPissant 7mo ago
I have a Macbook pro and a Linux machine attached to my dual 4k monitors. Fonts on Linux (KDE Plasma on Wayland) look noticeably sharper than the Mac. I don't use subpixel rendering either. I hate that I have to use the Mac for work.
chocochunks 7mo ago
This [1] has good examples. 24" 4K is on the smaller side and so less noticeable than on larger displays like 27" or 32". [1] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/
brailsafe 7mo ago
I'm more surprised that you're using a 24" display at any resolution. Of course, everyone has different preferences, but that just seems ridiculously small considering how available larger displays are for the same ppi and refresh rate probably. I'm personally on the old 30" 16:10 2560x1600 form factor, and it's wildly better visually than the 27" 1440p screen by the same brand (all of them Dell) I use at the office.
- badc0ffee 7mo ago

hollerith 7mo ago

Wayland supports it (and Chrome supports it very well) but GTK does not. I run my UI at 200% scaling because graphical Emacs uses GTK to draw text, and that text would be blurry if I ran at my preferred scaling factor of 150% or 175%.

PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
GTK uses Pango/Harfbuzz and some other components to draw text, all of which are widely used in other Linux GUI stacks. GTK/GDK do not draw text themselves, so your complaints are not with them directly.
- hollerith 7mo ago
  I'm not asseting that text is being rendered incorrectly. I'm asserting that after rendering, the text is being downsampled.
gucci-on-fleek 7mo ago
This works with GTK for me at least. I've been using Gnome+Wayland with 150% scaling for almost 4 years now, and I haven't noticed any issues with GTK. Actually, my experience is essentially backwards from yours—anything Electron/Chromium-based needed a bunch of command-line flags to work properly up until a few months ago, whereas GTK apps always just worked without any issues.
- hollerith 7mo ago
  If you're using a high-DPI monitor, you might not notice the blurriness. I use a standard 110-DPI monitor (at 200% scaling in Gnome) and I notice it when the scaling factor is not an integer. Or more precisely, I noticed it eventually as a result of my being primed to notice it after people on this site insisted that GTK cannot handle fractional scaling factors. Compared to the contents of a browser's viewport, Emacs and the apps that come with Gnome are visually simple, so it took me a year or 2 to notice (even on a standard 110-DPI monitor used at 150% and 175% scaling) any blurriness in those apps since the app I'm most conditioned to notice blurriness is my browser, and Chrome's viewport is resolution independent except when rendering certain image formats -- text is always non-blurry. Yes, Chrome's entire window can be quite blurry if Xwayland is involved, but it now talks to Wayland by default and for years before that could be configured to talk Wayland, so I don't consider that worth talking about. If Xwayland is not involved, the contents of Chrome's viewport is non-blurry at all scaling factors except for the PNGs, JPGs, etc. For a long time, when run at a fractional scaling factor under Gnome (and configured to talk Wayland) the only part of Hacker News that was blurry was the "Y" logo in the top left corner, then about 2 years ago, that logo's PNG file was replaced with an SVG file and the final bit of blurriness on HN went away.

benbayard 7mo ago

I just tested on my 4k display and 150% and 175% were not blurry at all. I'm on a 32 inch 4k monitor. Is it possible this information is out of date and was fixed by more recent versions of macos?

kinematikk 7mo ago
Absolutely not fixed. Try to look on black text on white background. Its not very obvious but still a little annoying
- benbayard 7mo ago
  Interesting, maybe it just doesn't bother me, because I do not notice it at all. I was looking at black text on a white background. Maybe it's less of an impact on Q-OLEDs with their pixel layout perhaps? I just checked and I actually run my ultra-wide monitor at 125% resolution and the text looks crisp. That one is a regular LED display but it does have really high pixel density (5120 x 2160, I run it at 3360x1418)

harr01 7mo ago

Have you ever seen a MacBook air's screen? Those use fractional scaling and look fine.

nailer 7mo ago

> macOS renders at a higher resolution and then downscales to the 4K resolution That seems weird to me. I remember 20 years ago one of the whole points of macOS version 10 was display PDF, i.e. a vector based UI.

watersb 7mo ago
While the original OS X display model, Quartz, evolved from Display PDF via NextStep, I believe that it shifted back to pixel rasterization to offload more of the display stack onto the GPU. Quartz Extreme? John Siracusa, Ars Technica: It's possible that existing consumer video cards could be coerced into doing efficient vector drawing in hardware. Apple tried to do just that in Tiger [note], but then had to back off at the last minute and disable the feature in the shipping version of the OS. It remains disabled to this day. [note] https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14 https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/04/3720/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/04/3720/