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MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-retina displays blurry

• mark-r 8y ago
  I wonder what panel technologies this is supposed to improve? The only one I can think of is a portrait rotated LCD.
  • Demiurge 8y ago
    It works (worked :/) just fine when switching to portrait mode. I use a secondary Dell monitor for that.
  • ken 8y ago
    PenTile, RGBW Quad, etc -- basically everything except plain old RGB stripes. Of all the possible display layouts, SPAA really only works with one (or it has to be re-designed for each, which realistically will never happen). The stats I've seen are that most Mac users, as of this year, are on @2x displays.
    • Lio 8y ago
      The real question is whether they’re on @2x disolays exclusively. I have a Retina MacBook Pro I mostly use it plugged into a 27” Dell 1440p monitor. Every office I’ve worked in that provided Macs also provided a 1x monitor of some kind. Never 4k or 5k.
• valine 8y ago
  Apple said during WWDC that the change was made to support a wider variety of display technologies and scaling modes. It’s an odd choice considering they still sell the non-retina MacBook Air.
  • wvenable 8y ago
    It's kind of a funny definition of support.
    • derefr 8y ago
      Forcing app developers to live with the same lowest-common-denominator aesthetics that most users see, will make them more likely to raise the bar for the aesthetics on lowest-common-denominator devices. It's the same reason that video game developers shouldn't be allowed to have powerful GPUs. They need to be testing how the game looks (and works) for most people, not for a group of people only slightly larger than themselves.
      • infogulch 8y ago
        Do you think most developers are using a non-retina screen? Compared to the general population I bet they skew very heavily towards newer, retina machines. Which means they'll barely notice anything. This is just plain lowering the bar, not raising the average.
        • jedberg 8y ago
          I'd say most developers are docking with an external screen, and there are very few external screens that are retina. So yeah, I'd say most developers are using a non-retina screen.
          • cerberusss 8y ago
            > I'd say most developers are using a non-retina screen I don't see this as a problem with 4K screens starting at 260 euros (~ US$ 306).
            • Hamuko 8y ago
              Why in the world would I want to use a 4K screen when I can get a 2560x1440 screen?
  • lcnmrn 8y ago
    Dark mode in Mojave points at OLED MacBooks. LCD subpixel antialiasing isn't working on OLED displays.
• deevolution 8y ago
  Planned obsolescence
• ghusbands 8y ago
  Subpixel AA only works when you know exactly what the output pixel layout is, when you aren't being scaled by some other technology and when you aren't showing the same thing on disparate displays, and it requires you to adapt whenever the screen rotates, which is common on tablet-style devices. Also, some people (like me) can see the discoloration it imbues. So I'll be glad to see it go. (Attempts to disable it tended to get various results in various operating systems, but rarely consistently disabled it)
  • peterkelly 8y ago
    I don't see why they couldn't make it configurable though
    • ghusbands 8y ago
      They did, but it was inconsistent [1]. Microsoft had the same problem [2]. In both cases, poorly-documented APIs meant many applications still used subpixel antialiasing. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/110750/how-do-i-disable-text-antialias-font-smoothing-in-terminal-and-globally-for-al https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/110750/how-do-i-di... [2] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/768bd013-cff9-4a80-a3f9-5ca04340871e/is-the-cleartype-tuner-working-for-you-in-win-10?forum=WinPreview2014General https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/768bd013-c...
  • Demiurge 8y ago
    Really? Somehow that 'only' has included every LCD monitor I've used for more than a decade. Windows AA is more aggressive, but it is still a huge improvement over the jagged over-hinted font rendering you get without ClearType. No AA makes sense for DPI greater than about 300, but for anything less, with visible pixels, which is probably most non-4K monitors, I would bet most people prefer AA on. In general, people always prefer AA for 3D and all sorts of other rendering, at lower DPI. So, this is a typical Apple decision to abandon anyone who doesn't have the latest device from them.
    • pvg 8y ago
• glhaynes 8y ago
  This seems certain to be related to integration of UIKit-on-macOS ("Marzipan") apps. (UIKit has never had subpixel antialiasing.)
  • mpweiher 8y ago
    The reason being that it tends to want to push pre-rendered bitmaps around, and sub-pixel anti-aliased pre-rendered bitmaps don't work well under rotation...
  • xenadu02 8y ago
    No.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• dragonshed 8y ago
  I still use a non-retina 13-inch from 2012, as well as an Ultrawide monitor (3440x1440), both of which I apparently wont be using with macOS Mojave. I can't help but think this is just another in a long line of paper cuts endured by professional users causing them to switch to a Windows machine.
  • zbraniecki 8y ago
    Or you know... Linux. Whatever. It's 2018.
• chx 8y ago
  The intent is to provide users with a sense of pride and accomplishment for buying new devices.
  • Hamuko 8y ago
    As long as it's not a monitor.
  • Sholmesy 8y ago
    Can we not just meme here please? This doesn't belong on HN.
• quipper 8y ago
  Signed up for HN (again) just to vent about this terrible news. This is a change that will be hard for me to live with, and I will probably end up selling all my Apple gear. This is the same change/downgrade that occurs if you go to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available. I did this and the fonts on my 5K iMac display looked horrible. Just atrocious. My plan is to not upgrade to Mojave, and then within a year or so sell all my Apple gear and move back to Linux. I don't understand Apple's thinking, but I believe a lot of people will do the same.
  • pixard 8y ago
    This doesn't affect retina devices so your 5k iMac will look the same it does now...
    • quipper 8y ago
      It does affect Retina devices. That's the whole point. I made the same change that Apple is going to make and the fonts looked far worse (almost unreadable). You can observe the same if you have an Apple device by going to: System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available. Apple is removing sub-pixel anti-aliasing for all devices, not just non-Retina ones.
      • eknkc 8y ago
        Try the beta before venting. It’s not the same thing.
        • quipper 8y ago
          Downloading the beta now, but have seen screenshots of both (here and elsewhere).
          • read_if_gay_ 8y ago
            I've been on the beta for a couple days (using a 2016 12" MacBook) and I haven't noticed anything. There's a visible difference when I disable LCD font smoothing in settings, but not much changes besides fonts appearing somewhat thinner.
• xucheng 8y ago
  In addition to the MacBook Air and normal non-4K external display, it seems that this will also affect projectors. Therefore, it seems that presentation using macOS Mojave will only make your slides/keynote look bad and less professional. Moreover, the projector is not something you can upgrade. It is usually preinstalled in whatever venue where you give your presentation, and totally outside your control.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    I doubt that many people will be able to tell the difference in your presentation if they're sitting twenty feet away.
    • ksec 8y ago
      Oh no no, on low res projector even if it is twenty feet away it is still definitely noticeable.
  • CarVac 8y ago
    Many projectors don't use RGB striped subpixel grids anyway. They use color wheels or multiple chips to achieve full coverage, and in that case you want grayscale antialiasing. And on top of usually not using RGB stripes, they also often use software keystone correction, which means that you don't know the native pixel grid anyway. So there's no disadvantage for projectors, not at all.
• ghostcluster 8y ago
  High Sierra's Metal rewrite of windowserver still has serious bugs nearly a year after shipping, even on a brand new MacBook Pro. They managed to ship 10.13 with bugs like this that made it into the Ars Technica review: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-23-2017-12-41-55.gif http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-23...
• tandav 8y ago
  MacBook Air. PDFs looks very blurry and dirty since High Sierra (Mojave too). In Preview.app and in Safari. You can compare it if open PDF in Chrome (looks sharp in chrome). https://imgur.com/a/TRpk1Oi https://imgur.com/a/TRpk1Oi fonts on some websites looks blurry https://imgur.com/a/o450Mlr https://imgur.com/a/o450Mlr
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • peterbecich 8y ago
    Seems similar to this issue with reading PDFs in Emacs (predates High Sierra, though): https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/51 https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/51
  • colinjoy 8y ago
    So are you saying the High Sierra PDF rendering catastrophy is not a bug but a precursor of this „feature“? If that is true and the blurred text is going to be the new normal, I do not see how any professional user looking at type all day long can stay on their platform.
    • galad87 8y ago
      No, Preview awful pdf rendering is unrelated to antialiasing.
    • tandav 8y ago
      Every time I open PDF I think about install El Capitan back. One thing that stops me is picture-in-picture mode. I use it heavily on youtube and it is only in Sierra and later.
      • galad87 8y ago
        El Capitan had the same issue on my mac. It was fixed in High Sierra, and came back in High Sierra.
  • 8y ago
• PakG1 8y ago
  Oh my goodness. And here I was thinking that I'd love the next macOS due to its alleged focus on stability. What the heck....
• update 8y ago
  So what's the solution here? Buy a new monitor if we want to use up-to-date versions of macOS? Anyone who uses Apple's FCPX or Logic knows we'll have to update to Mojave because eventually we'll try to open the latest version of said software and be told "You must be running Mojave to open this" I'd really ditch Apple because of stunts like this, but I really love Logic and FCPX so I'm stuck with it.
• SCdF 8y ago
  I hope we are all somehow misunderstanding how terrible this is. The idea that they would downgrade the display support so that non-retina monitors--- and let's be serious, that is nearly all monitors that people dock into at work or at home-- are going to look worse in Mojave, is almost too absurd to be true. I want to see this for myself. Does anyone know if you can simulate this now, without installing the beta? Or if you can install or somehow use the beta without nuking what you already have? Edit: I am still on Sierra, because the buzz around High Sierra made it sounds like it was a bad idea to upgrade. This is sounding more and more like Mojave is a no-go as well.
  • quipper 8y ago
    You can simulate this by going to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available and unchecking it. It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.
    • zaroth 8y ago
      I do not think this is an accurate way to simulate the issue reported. This simulation will look worse than the actual issue, which is not present on 4K+ displays.
      • comex 8y ago
        Yeah – on Mojave that checkbox still exists and unchecking it still makes fonts look different (less bold).
        • dolguldur 8y ago
          that's good to know! Then the difference shouldn't be that big on Retina displays. I just compared on High Sierra and it's mostly that without subpixel AA types look thinner
      • quipper 8y ago
        I confirmed that the issue still exists by installing Mojave beta. The fonts looks terrible -- very thin and blurry.
• the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  Not cool at all. I don’t want a high dpi external monitor because it’s too laggy. Very annoying change.
• mortenjorck 8y ago
  This is the software equivalent to moving exclusively to USB-C. 18 months after the 2016 MacBook Pro, the vast majority of hardware currently in use still requires a dongle, and 18 months from Mojave's release, the vast majority of external monitors in use will still look blurry without subpixel AA. Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. And it may work in the short term, but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms.
  • crehn 8y ago
    Not as long as the competition lags behind.
  • mehrdadn 8y ago
    Microsoft has been having similar font rendering issues for years, so I guess Apple felt left out of this club. They spent all this awesome work & research creating ClearType and then when Vista(?) happened they suddenly decided screw everything, let's switch back to grayscale antialiasing for no reason... now everything on the taskbar (or seemingly anything DWM-rendered) is grayscale-smoothed, which makes me want to tear my eyes out.
    • Jasper_ 8y ago
      > let's switch back to grayscale antialiasing for no reason... The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing, because of complications related to blending. The classic way of doing subpixel text rendering means you need three distinct alpha channels, and most hardware only lets you supply just one. There are ways of hacking around this with dual-source blending, but such a feature was not supported at the time of Vista. In Windows 8 and up, DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
      • ygra 8y ago
        UWP for the most part doesn't seem to use subpixel AA, though (Edge only does so in the content, but not the window chrome).
• Angostura 8y ago
  It’s a beta. Report it as a bug.
  • Lio 8y ago
    Its’s not a bug. It was announced as a change at WWDC. It’s believed to be a consequence of the move to merge iOS code into macOS. iOS doesn’t support sub-pixel antialiasing.
    • Angostura 8y ago
      That's no reason not to report it either as a bug or file as an enhancement request.
• frou_dh 8y ago
  Nothing like some frothy sight-unseen outrage on a Saturday morning.
• galad87 8y ago
  Here's a comparison, so we can comment on he actual difference: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/KWL7NNNX http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparis...
  • pvg 8y ago
    You aren't going to capture the details of subpixel AA in a screenshot.
    • spiralganglion 8y ago
      You most certainly can. The effect is applied when shading the text, so it does appear in screenshots, as would any other in-software AA technique (AFAIK). You can test this yourself in the browser. For instance, toggle subpixel AA using the CSS -webkit-font-smoothing property in Safari. There is a clear visible difference that you can screenshot. On some websites with a light-on-dark theme, disabling subpixel AA with CSS was an important part of improving visual consistency between browsers. It’s also important to explicitly control when working with animations that changes text scale or rotation. It’s easier to see with an enlarged screenshot, but you can totally see the difference at 1x.
      • pvg 8y ago
        I don't know what you can toggle with CSS but I'm pretty sure you can't replicate 'thing rendering a font with knowledge of your physical display' with 'bitmap made of pixels and some CSS'.
        • spiralganglion 8y ago
          The “knowledge” is applied when the text is rendered to the bitmap, not when the bitmap is pushed to the display. You’d be right if the effect happened quite late in the rendering process. It doesn’t — it happens really early.
          • 8y ago
• wodenokoto 8y ago
  One guys dell monitor doesn't - subjectively - render input from a beta OS as pretty as it did the non-beta, and suddenly everybody is bringing out the pitchforks. If you read through the comments, you'll find this link buried, which shows a developer showcasing the difference in the new AA. Basically font-smoothing is grayscale-only in Mojave. * https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1683 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1... If I take a screenshot of some text and zoom in, I can see the colours, just like in the video. If I zoom back to normal size and change the saturation to zero (only greyscale) I cannot see a change in sharpness of the text on my 2009 macbook pro.
  • 1897235235 8y ago
    >Basically font-smoothing is grayscale-only in Mojave. This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily. Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.
    • dchest 8y ago
      Very strange, this has been configurable in System Preferences > General (currently "Use LCD font smoothing when available", previously there were more choices) for ages.
      • kccqzy 8y ago
        Yes I remember back in Leopard it wasn't just a checkbox, but a drop down menu allowing you turn it off completely or choose "Light", "Medium" or "Strong." I've always found the Strong setting the best for me and have kept it ever since. (There's a `defaults write` command to set this value still, but the effect is a lot less noticeable on Retina.)
      • 8y ago
• gnachman 8y ago
  I released a build of iTerm2 last year that accidentally disabled subpixel AA and everyone flipped out. People definitely notice. But the reason I’m sad is that this wonderful hack was short lived: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vfBq6vg409Zky-IQ7ne-Yy7olPtVCl0dq3PG20E8KDs/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vfBq6vg409Zky-IQ7ne-Yy7o... My pet theory is that macOS is going to pull in a bunch of iOS code and iOS has never had subpixel AA.
  • 1897235235 8y ago
    They give justification for it in the video linked somewhere else in the comments. They say "it works better on a wider variety of displays" in reference to the gray-scale approach. I am guessing they are probably switching to oled across all of their products.
    • red75prime 8y ago
      > They say "it works better on a wider variety of displays That's PR-speak. Translation "It works acceptably well for all pixel layouts, and it is easier for us to implement".
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    Informative as always, George. > I released a build of iTerm2 last year that accidentally disabled subpixel AA and everyone flipped out. People definitely notice. On a Retina display at least I find that the most striking difference is that most text appears to have a lighter weight. Maybe that's the difference people are perceiving, rather than color fringing or whatever?
    • raphlinus 8y ago
      It's simply a different setting for stem thickening, the subpixel AA modes added a lot. It would definitely be possible to set the same stem thickening for grayscale rendering, and on hi-res monitors it would look pretty similar.
  • coldtea 8y ago
• fireattack 8y ago
  It doesn't surprise me, since even Microsoft is slowly dropping ClearType.
• blt 8y ago
  I never upgraded past Mavericks. It seems that the OS has been going downhill. Thinking about installing Ubuntu on my MacBook.
• ivirshup 8y ago
  Am misreading this thread, or was this one person's complaint on reddit about beta software (with a single commenter saying they've seen the same behavior)? Are there any more cases, or could this be a bug? Cause it seems like a bug to me.
  • mpweiher 8y ago
    The change was also announced at WWDC. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1683 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1...
• ridiculous_fish 8y ago
  ex-MacOS SWE here. Subpixel antialiasing is obnoxious to implement. It requires threading physical pixel geometry up through multiple graphics layers, geometry which is screen-dependent (think multi-monitor). It multiplies your glyph caches: glyph * subpixel offset. It requires knowing your foreground and background colors at render time, which is an unnatural requirement when you want to do GPU-accelerated compositing. There's tons of ways to fall off of the subpixel antialiased quality path, and there's weird graphical artifacts when switching from static to animated text, or the other way. What a pain! Nevertheless there's no denying that subpixel-AA text looks better on 1x displays. Everyone notices when it's not working, and macOS will look worse without it (on 1x displays).
  • davnn 8y ago
    > Subpixel antialiasing is obnoxious to implement. Isn't it completely abstracted away from 99%+ of macOS development?
    • jacobolus 8y ago
      Yes, but if it dramatically increases complexity for all the lower levels of the rendering stack, it ends up creating extra work for those OS/framework developers, requiring separate versions of the code targeting different displays which must be maintained separately with different sets of bugs in each, preventing them from making large-scale architectural changes they want to make, restricting some types of significant optimizations, etc.
      • sova 8y ago
        Yeah but isn't it already a solved problem with 1x monitors? Who is implementing things multiple times for no reason? I'm glad in the future it will be easier for Apple because they just won't hire devs to do that part then, but does this imply that 1x monitors will simply look inferior no matter what is done with newer versions of OSX+?
        • rbanffy 8y ago
• cJ0th 8y ago
  I so knew it! I even put a reminder in my calendar some time ago (not knowing what the next update holds) to not upgrade until I know for sure that my experience won't get worse.
• jbverschoor 8y ago
  Since retina I disabled it myself
• hyko 8y ago
  Subpixel font rendering was a cool hack back in the day, but it’s no match for high dpi monitors. Personally I could never get past the color fringing artefacts. Bill Hill himself talked about it as an interim measure to get people reading on screen. Here he is talking about the original implementation of ClearType: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-How-does-ClearType-work https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-Ho... Joel Spolsky on the different sub pixel AA approaches taken by Apple and Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-anti-aliasing-and-sub-pixel-rendering/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...
• some_account 8y ago
  Apple strikes again....they recently destroyed having two external displays with a recent update, and now they mess up single screen external displays too. I have a MacBook Air connected to a 2560x1440 screen and fonts looks good. I was looking forward to Mojaves dark mode. Now I'm afraid to install Mojave. I understand that Apple wants to simplify their code, but they can't just remove things before having an alternate solution to a problem that exist. Font rendering is really super important... I really hope they reconsider.
• rbanffy 8y ago
  I'm betting Apple will launch a family of Retina desktop monitors. Also, remember it's still beta software. People do public betas to surface issues like these.
• quipper 8y ago
  I just installed the Mojave beta on my Macbook Pro. The fonts are just as blurry as if I toggle off "Use LCD font smoothing when available" in High Sierra. So the contention that it won't be the same in Mojave is disproven. Even on Retina displays, disabling sub-pixel anti-aliasing leads to blurry, indistinct fonts.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    Mojave doesn't ship with subpixel antialiasing. The "LCD font smoothing" checkbox disables greyscale smoothing.
    • quipper 8y ago
      I know Mojave doesn't ship with subpixel anti-aliasing. That is my whole complaint. My point was if that box is checked in Mojave (that is, greyscale anti-aliasing is on) the fonts still look atrocious. Sorry if that was not clear.
• hn0 8y ago
  I must be the odd one out in that I actually prefer my fonts to look “soft”?
• kuon 8y ago
  That must be personal, but I always preferred grayscale AA.
  • copperx 8y ago
    What's the last time you got an eye exam?
    • kuon 8y ago
      I'm a pilot, so every year.
• quipper 8y ago
  In other news, how is Linux's sub-pixel anti-aliasing lately? I haven't used it in years, and never on a 4K or above display. Since I will now be switching off Mac, Linux is looking likely again. It will probably be two 27" 4K monitors.
  • livebsd 8y ago
    As of "lately" in the sense of "in the last 10 years", it was always great. Freetype always had great rendering, on part and often superior to both ClearType and OSX to my eyes. I attribute the bad perceived performance of freetype to the lack of good and/or commercial fonts. The default configuration in most distributions is decent, but with little tuning everything can be changed to your taste. I ran with grayscale AA since the beginning because I find the color fringing annoying. I also used to like the bytecode hinter, but in the last years with my laptop having 120+ dpi, I find the freetype autohinter to be actually superior as it better preserves the letterform and provides sharper results even without subpixel AA. The settings can also be tailored per-font, and apply system-wide, with the exception of some stupid QML and Electron apps.
    • quipper 8y ago
      Thanks for that detailed response. I last used Linux full-time as my main machine in 2009 or so. It has indeed been a while. Good to know that it has improved since that time.
  • simon_o 8y ago
    Freetype has been superior to Microsoft's and Apple's implementation for years, with incremental improvements ever since. One of the reasons I would never buy a Windows or macOS machine. These companies really need to sort out their quality issues with font rendering.
• pibefision 8y ago
  Could be this a measure to combat hackintosh installed base?
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    How so?
• Philipp__ 8y ago
  Ok, so what are options in terms of external displays? I guess this will make my Dell 1080p monitor much less appealing... I planned to jump to 4k 24inch anyway... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• kccqzy 8y ago
  Okay, this might be an unpopular opinion but I've always actually preferred plain AA (grayscale), not subpixel AA. That's especially on a low-res screen. I discovered this preference back in the flip phones days when a certain J2ME reading app offered a choice between grayscale AA and subpixel AA. I immediately noticed that for subpixel AA, there is a lot of red and blue even when the text is black on white. Those colors just make me nauseated. Grayscale AA makes the text a bit more blurry, but I can actually read that text for hours without feeling nauseated. When I was using Ubuntu, I was offered four choices for font rendering. The subpixel rendering choice also looked terrible to me. On macOS Safari (maybe Chrome too) exposes a CSS property called -webkit-font-smoothing. Many websites set this to antialiased, including many built by me, because I truly think this antialias mode looks the best.
  • mackal 8y ago
    From a comment someone else made, I'm gonna guess you're red green color blind :P
• vesak 8y ago
  I've been using Linux for 2 decades, and this year I moved to MacOS, with the newest MacBook and a 5K iMac. Everything pretty much just works, is much prettier by default than I ever got my Linux installations to be. Given my experiences, I have full trust that the MacOS engineers will do good stuff with Mojave too, at least eventually. I still like Desktop Linux, though, and sincerely wish it will be as good some day. It most definitely is not today.
• nine_k 8y ago
  One thing that I noticed when I had to switch from a Linux desktop to an MBP is how much worse text anti-aliasing is. The crispness just isn't there, especially at smaller font sizes. Certainly the MBP has a high-res screen and can live without it, but it's highly reflective, and anti-glare external monitors provided by most employers are mere FHD, and most fonts become unpleasant and hard to read without anti-aliasing on them. Maybe anti-aliasing was just hard to implement nicely in OSX graphics stack, they struggled with it, and decided to remove it. I suspect that most of Apple's "proper computer" sales are laptops where they put a retina display anyway, and if you shell out $2k for a laptop, you can afford to spend $300 for a 4K external display. In other words, they (correctly) decided that theirs is the premium segment, and that segment can afford to switch to retina-only hardware.
  • baggyfounder 8y ago
    >I suspect that most of Apple's "proper computer" sales are laptops where they put a retina display anyway, and if you shell out $2k for a laptop, you can afford to spend $300 for a 4K external display. My old windows computer is dying and I am thinking about getting a new mac. It seems the choice is a $2200 imac, or a $2700 mbp + a $1000 4k 21.5inch monitor. LG is one of the very few companies that sells 4k 21.5inch and 5k 27inch monitors. Even 4k 24inch monitors, which I am guessing you are referring to, are quite rare. They are also not really approved by Apple. I mean, 4k 24inch will make everything look too big I assume, and 4k 27inch isn't retina quality. So what exactly are we supposed to do? There are no external monitors to buy. Apple doesn't sell any, and the 3rd party solutions are few and far between. Maybe they want everyone to buy an imac and a mbp...
    • nine_k 8y ago
      Fortunately, there are a quite few Windows-oriented machines with very decent specs now; some of them have an explicit Linux option, too. 21-22" 4k monitors are indeed pretty rare; 23-24" 4k are more widespread. I would gladly buy a 15-17" 3k / 4k display, like another laptop screen, but they seem to be absent from the market for some reason, despite the wealth of ready-made LCD panels for them.
• sbarre 8y ago
  So is Apple going to stop selling the 21" iMac that has a 1920x1080 panel? What about someone who buys one today?
• jokoon 8y ago
  I don't know how you can justify making devices so expensive. It's almost like buying Apple calls out for social status. That brand will always remind of class warfare.
• coleifer 8y ago
  Wasn't typography Steve Jobs "big thing" he wanted to do well on the Mac?
  • iaml 8y ago
    Seeing mac screenshots with amazing font rendering was one of the things that made me switch to mac. I guess I won't be updating past high sierra.
• asadkn 8y ago
  From perspective of Web Designers and Web Devs who obsess over font-rendering, the way I see it: -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; will be the default now as opposed to subpixel-antialiased. And you will no longer have control over it. Seems like it DOES affect Retina displays too. That's a bummer as quite a lot of fonts get too thin without subpixel-antialiasing even on MBP Retina.
• timeimp 8y ago
  So THIS explains why the beta Apple News app on Mojave looks _so bad_ on my 1x display...
• kzrdude 8y ago
  Seems like a further shift from user friendliness towards consumer friendliness. That is, alienating core and power user in favour of larger consumer masses.
• gigatexal 8y ago
  As long as they find a fix I’ll be happy. I want things to look crisp.
• gleglegle 8y ago
  This is sad. It should be an option when using 1x displays.
• userbinator 8y ago
  I'm not surprised, Apple loves removing configurability and thinks "one-size-fits-all". It would be far better to make the font rendering settings more configurable instead, but sadly this trend is not limited to only Apple. ...and I'm saying this as one of those for whom any form of antialiasing is blurry, subpixel being worse (my eyes water and feel dizzy after prolonged exposure), preferring AA off and pixel fonts with sharp, high-contrast edges instead. Let people have the font rendering they want.
• baxuz 8y ago
  The problem is that there are no external 2x displays on the market (apart from the recalled trainwreck that was LG ultrasharp 5k): https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ Scaling is horrible on MacOS since it basically bumps up the 1x resolution to the next integer multiplier and then does a per-frame raster resize leading to performance drops, blurry edges and other render artifacts. Meaning that your only reasonable option was to run a 1x monitor without scaling. Now they killed that option too. Basically what they did, if your primary work machine was a MacBook hooked to a 27" display — is tell you "Buy an iMac and use Continuity". I mean, I'm all up for removing subpixel antialiasing at the point where everyone is running a 220+ppi monitor. However, we're not at that point yet. This is a horrible move that may cause me to drop the Mac as a development platform, since I'm looking at text for 8+ hours a day, and I'm not planning on shelling out 3k€ for an iMac or 2k€+ if they get back into the display business, just to fix something that they broke.
  • ricardobeat 8y ago
    I use a display in the 'red zone' described in the article (a Dell P2415) daily paired to a retina MBP; there are no issues coming from not being an even multiple, it's the sharpest monitor I've ever had.
    • baxuz 8y ago
      I recently worked on a 4k 24" monitor (~180ppi) on a 2017 MBP. The text was either too small when rendered at 1x, or the framerate dropped to a crawl when using a scaling option. Everything was rendering at under 60 fps. Plus I could clearly see the rendering artifacts when scrolling, mentioned in the article.
• SZJX 8y ago
  Wow. The one biggest advantage my previous MBP had over my current Arch Linux + i3 setup on Carbon X1 is the natural support for HiDPI, as I connect my laptop to external monitors all the time (The only other one is the built-in dictionary). Now Apple are going in this direction further and further I definitely don't see myself returning to Mac any time soon, or indeed ever.
• nickm12 8y ago
  I'll be that guy and say that I don't like sub-pixel anti-aliasing—I find the color fringes distracting. I turn it off wherever possible. That said, people seem to like it so it's a shame the option is going away.
• SEJeff 8y ago
  And here I was thinking I was just getting worse eyesight. Lovely.