8 ms·

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 requi

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).
    - 0xFFC 8y ago
      And that was the exact reason why I left windows as workstation to Ubuntu. It did torture my eye every time I was looking at UWP app.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    > The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing But what was this crazy obsession with hardware-acceleration of every rendered character and its grandmother? While you're busy Flippin' 3D I get it, you can temporarily render aliased Wingdings if that makes your life easier, but at least for Pete's sake I just want to enjoy not tearing my eyes out the other 99.99999% of the time. If there was anything slow or poorly implemented in XP it honestly wasn't the taskbar font rendering. (Not angry at you; just annoyed at the situation they caused.) > DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default. No, it (still) doesn't. This is my taskbar: https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png
    - dictum 8y ago
      I can't substantiate my comment with academic sources, but here's my memory from the past decade: the people designing interface guidelines for mobile operating systems decided that carefully designing static visual assets for UIs was a waste of time (with similar technical complexity reasonings due to the number of different display resolutions/pixels per inch/aspect ratios) Market context: Microsoft yearned to implement the Metro UI they'd been researching for a long time (Zune was its public appearance) — and Vista kind of soured people on Aero by osmosis; third-party Android applications always had consistency issues, so Google wanted to mandate something that would be generic enough to work (and be easily implemented) for all apps but also look distinctly specific to Android; Apple wanted to signal some shift to upscale high fashion (parallel to "everything is black glossy glass and aluminum" in its industrial design) and understood fashion-minded upscale as a mix of modernist typography with neon bright contemporary color schemes. To make up for the boring visual aesthetic that often resulted, they recommended adding animations throughout apps. Most of these animations aren't very helpful, but they keep the user distracted for a moment.
    - Jasper_ 8y ago
      I chose my words carefully: font compositing, not rendering. Font rendering still happens in software, but in order to composite it correctly into the surface requires DSB. I (hopefully) shouldn't have to explain the advantages of using hardware acceleration for app rendering in general.
- fireattack 8y ago
  > then when Vista(?) happened they suddenly decided screw everything What? ClearType was basically introduced in Vista and refined in Win 7. Win 8 is when they start to remove it for various applications (UWP, and some others) due to its poor performance on retatable devices (tablets mainly).
  - pix64 8y ago
    ClearType definitely existed for XP
    - fireattack 8y ago
      That's why I say "basically". They only made it the default starting from Vista.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. I think they simply believe they're large enough player to make such calls unilaterally, and that the rest of the industry will follow. And I fear they might be right - such decisions enter into the calculations of more "commoditized" vendors like peripheral manufacturers when they design next iterations of their products. I mean, that's why removing the headphone jack is such a big deal even for people not using iPhones. Not just because we sympathize with iPhone owners - but because Apple is big enough to make this stupidity a new standard everywhere.
- melling 8y ago
  USB-C still hasn’t arrived as the definitive standard. Apple isn’t quite big enough to force an industry change in personal computers.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    USB-C clearly is the way forward.
    - melling 8y ago
      The USB-C only Mac Book was released 3 years ago. PC’s have been slowly adopting it. Give it a couple of more years.
    - cookiecaper 8y ago
      I'm not sure. As more devices and peripherals have gained USB-C, lots of horror stories of chargers frying devices and other catastrophic failures have shown up. This isn't my wheelhouse, but just from the reading I've done, it sounds like USB-C is a difficult-to-implement standard and that peripheral makers are more interested in getting something out the door quickly and cheaply. With the amount of power that USB-C can drive, this is risky. If the end result is that you can't tell if plugging into your friend's charger is going to blow up your phone (or video game console), I think USB-C is going to fall apart.
chmars 8y ago
I am actually quite happy with USB-C: Charging has become easier since I can has the ports on both sides of my MacBook. Dongles are necessary, however, they have been necessary for as long as I can remember with Macs. Of course, a native HDMI port would still be great …
- katbyte 8y ago
  macbook pro users of 8 years here, aside from ethernet/DVI at an office not once have I used a dongle, and tbh those two dongles aren't all that bad because i would just leave them at my desk. I love my magsafe charge + 2 thunder + 2 USB + HDMI ports and can't imagine life with fewer.
chewz 8y ago
Just install ChromeOS on your Macbooks, forget about macOS and you will be fine.
- vesinisa 8y ago
  Or any GNU/Linux distribution, which actually offer a superior developer experience in my opinion. People complaining about their Macs type posts constantly top HN. Usually the comments are filled with further moaning about how things have been so bad for so long with Apple etc., usually accompanied by threats of moving to another platform.
  - EduardoBautista 8y ago
    I complain about the Mac from time to time. I just think the alternatives are much worse.
  - hungerstrike 8y ago
    Followed by comments about how Mac OS is somehow “the best” despite the fact that the vast majority of developers prefer Windows.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    I certainly prefer Linux over native OS X as my development environment, if I ignore the issue of using the hardware. In particular, with OS X I never need to worry about video drivers, switching dGPU on/off, etc. just to use my laptop in typical ways.
- irascible 8y ago
  I bought a chrome book on sale for 140 bucks. I thought it was a toy but probably fine for email.. fast forward.. that chromebook has outlasted my other desktop and laptop.. it's been beaten up.. tossed around.. I've loaned it to computer illiterate relatIves who use it with zero problems, and it has never gotten jacked up with adware. Now when I'm on the road I write javascript on it, disconnected from the net. Some of the best money I've ever spent.
Dylan16807 8y ago
USB-C is great. Putting only a single port on a laptop is stupid. Retina screens are great. Disabling the better font-rendering tech is stupid. And doubling the resolution doesn't make subpixel AA obsolete either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wingerlang 8y ago
I use a USB-C only macbook pro and I absolutely love it, I would not want to go back to a laptop with a lot of IO. The main reason is that when I have to move somewhere, it is only one thing to remove (and then add back in) compared to the 5 minute shuffle I used to do. There have only been one or two situations in a year where it caused a slight annoyance.
- dsego 8y ago
  That is nonsensical, nobody is putting a gun to your head to use all the ports. Having them available is definitely better than not. And if you prefer dongles, keep using them.
  - pivo 8y ago
    I think what he is saying is that he can plug everything into his one dongle and then unplug everything just by unplugging his dongle.
    - disiplus 8y ago
      for that to work you have to have tree dongles then, one at home, one at work and one to carry around, i have it like that, it sux
      - wingerlang 8y ago
        I just bought a second one to leave at work, I don't think it sucks at all.
  - disiplus 8y ago
    i have 4 usb-c on my macbook of that one i used for a usb-c to displayport to connect to my 4k monitor and the other is used for a dongle, i dont know what this guy is talking about, to be honest i would love to have one regular usb to not to have to carry the adapter or dongles everywhere.
  - wingerlang 8y ago
akvadrako 8y ago
Just like they did with USB and Displayport, while PCs continued to come with PS/2 and VGA ports for 10 years after Apple switched. Legacy is technical debt. You have to move on eventually; for many, the pain is worth doing it early.
izacus 8y ago
There's on MAJOR difference though - you'd have to deliberately buy a USB-C only Mac to enter the dongle world. This change will be pushed to everyone with a software update and we'll be constantly nagged to update with popups if we don't.
legulere 8y ago
Or examples loner ago: Apple ditching DVD drives or Apple ditching floppy drives.
nkkollaw 8y ago
> but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but they've been pulling this stuff for ages, and it doesn't look like people are going anywhere.
rsync 8y ago
"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." Interestingly, it drove me to buy three maxed-out 11" MBAs before they were discontinued. So I have not left the Apple computer platform but I won't be buying another laptop until I burn through these three - which could be as late as 2022-2023 ... As for fonts/aliasing - I just won't upgrade past Sierra (or whatever ... I use Mavericks now ...)

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).
  - 0xFFC 8y ago
    And that was the exact reason why I left windows as workstation to Ubuntu. It did torture my eye every time I was looking at UWP app.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing But what was this crazy obsession with hardware-acceleration of every rendered character and its grandmother? While you're busy Flippin' 3D I get it, you can temporarily render aliased Wingdings if that makes your life easier, but at least for Pete's sake I just want to enjoy not tearing my eyes out the other 99.99999% of the time. If there was anything slow or poorly implemented in XP it honestly wasn't the taskbar font rendering. (Not angry at you; just annoyed at the situation they caused.) > DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default. No, it (still) doesn't. This is my taskbar: https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png
  - dictum 8y ago
    I can't substantiate my comment with academic sources, but here's my memory from the past decade: the people designing interface guidelines for mobile operating systems decided that carefully designing static visual assets for UIs was a waste of time (with similar technical complexity reasonings due to the number of different display resolutions/pixels per inch/aspect ratios) Market context: Microsoft yearned to implement the Metro UI they'd been researching for a long time (Zune was its public appearance) — and Vista kind of soured people on Aero by osmosis; third-party Android applications always had consistency issues, so Google wanted to mandate something that would be generic enough to work (and be easily implemented) for all apps but also look distinctly specific to Android; Apple wanted to signal some shift to upscale high fashion (parallel to "everything is black glossy glass and aluminum" in its industrial design) and understood fashion-minded upscale as a mix of modernist typography with neon bright contemporary color schemes. To make up for the boring visual aesthetic that often resulted, they recommended adding animations throughout apps. Most of these animations aren't very helpful, but they keep the user distracted for a moment.
  - Jasper_ 8y ago
    I chose my words carefully: font compositing, not rendering. Font rendering still happens in software, but in order to composite it correctly into the surface requires DSB. I (hopefully) shouldn't have to explain the advantages of using hardware acceleration for app rendering in general.
fireattack 8y ago
> then when Vista(?) happened they suddenly decided screw everything What? ClearType was basically introduced in Vista and refined in Win 7. Win 8 is when they start to remove it for various applications (UWP, and some others) due to its poor performance on retatable devices (tablets mainly).
- pix64 8y ago
  ClearType definitely existed for XP
  - fireattack 8y ago
    That's why I say "basically". They only made it the default starting from Vista.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. I think they simply believe they're large enough player to make such calls unilaterally, and that the rest of the industry will follow. And I fear they might be right - such decisions enter into the calculations of more "commoditized" vendors like peripheral manufacturers when they design next iterations of their products. I mean, that's why removing the headphone jack is such a big deal even for people not using iPhones. Not just because we sympathize with iPhone owners - but because Apple is big enough to make this stupidity a new standard everywhere.

melling 8y ago
USB-C still hasn’t arrived as the definitive standard. Apple isn’t quite big enough to force an industry change in personal computers.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  USB-C clearly is the way forward.
  - melling 8y ago
    The USB-C only Mac Book was released 3 years ago. PC’s have been slowly adopting it. Give it a couple of more years.
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    I'm not sure. As more devices and peripherals have gained USB-C, lots of horror stories of chargers frying devices and other catastrophic failures have shown up. This isn't my wheelhouse, but just from the reading I've done, it sounds like USB-C is a difficult-to-implement standard and that peripheral makers are more interested in getting something out the door quickly and cheaply. With the amount of power that USB-C can drive, this is risky. If the end result is that you can't tell if plugging into your friend's charger is going to blow up your phone (or video game console), I think USB-C is going to fall apart.

chmars 8y ago

I am actually quite happy with USB-C: Charging has become easier since I can has the ports on both sides of my MacBook. Dongles are necessary, however, they have been necessary for as long as I can remember with Macs. Of course, a native HDMI port would still be great …

katbyte 8y ago
macbook pro users of 8 years here, aside from ethernet/DVI at an office not once have I used a dongle, and tbh those two dongles aren't all that bad because i would just leave them at my desk. I love my magsafe charge + 2 thunder + 2 USB + HDMI ports and can't imagine life with fewer.

chewz 8y ago

Just install ChromeOS on your Macbooks, forget about macOS and you will be fine.

vesinisa 8y ago
Or any GNU/Linux distribution, which actually offer a superior developer experience in my opinion. People complaining about their Macs type posts constantly top HN. Usually the comments are filled with further moaning about how things have been so bad for so long with Apple etc., usually accompanied by threats of moving to another platform.
- EduardoBautista 8y ago
  I complain about the Mac from time to time. I just think the alternatives are much worse.
- hungerstrike 8y ago
  Followed by comments about how Mac OS is somehow “the best” despite the fact that the vast majority of developers prefer Windows.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  I certainly prefer Linux over native OS X as my development environment, if I ignore the issue of using the hardware. In particular, with OS X I never need to worry about video drivers, switching dGPU on/off, etc. just to use my laptop in typical ways.
irascible 8y ago
I bought a chrome book on sale for 140 bucks. I thought it was a toy but probably fine for email.. fast forward.. that chromebook has outlasted my other desktop and laptop.. it's been beaten up.. tossed around.. I've loaned it to computer illiterate relatIves who use it with zero problems, and it has never gotten jacked up with adware. Now when I'm on the road I write javascript on it, disconnected from the net. Some of the best money I've ever spent.

Dylan16807 8y ago

USB-C is great. Putting only a single port on a laptop is stupid. Retina screens are great. Disabling the better font-rendering tech is stupid. And doubling the resolution doesn't make subpixel AA obsolete either.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

wingerlang 8y ago

I use a USB-C only macbook pro and I absolutely love it, I would not want to go back to a laptop with a lot of IO. The main reason is that when I have to move somewhere, it is only one thing to remove (and then add back in) compared to the 5 minute shuffle I used to do. There have only been one or two situations in a year where it caused a slight annoyance.

dsego 8y ago
That is nonsensical, nobody is putting a gun to your head to use all the ports. Having them available is definitely better than not. And if you prefer dongles, keep using them.
- pivo 8y ago
  I think what he is saying is that he can plug everything into his one dongle and then unplug everything just by unplugging his dongle.
  - disiplus 8y ago
    for that to work you have to have tree dongles then, one at home, one at work and one to carry around, i have it like that, it sux
    - wingerlang 8y ago
      I just bought a second one to leave at work, I don't think it sucks at all.
- disiplus 8y ago
  i have 4 usb-c on my macbook of that one i used for a usb-c to displayport to connect to my 4k monitor and the other is used for a dongle, i dont know what this guy is talking about, to be honest i would love to have one regular usb to not to have to carry the adapter or dongles everywhere.
- wingerlang 8y ago

akvadrako 8y ago

Just like they did with USB and Displayport, while PCs continued to come with PS/2 and VGA ports for 10 years after Apple switched. Legacy is technical debt. You have to move on eventually; for many, the pain is worth doing it early.

izacus 8y ago

There's on MAJOR difference though - you'd have to deliberately buy a USB-C only Mac to enter the dongle world. This change will be pushed to everyone with a software update and we'll be constantly nagged to update with popups if we don't.

legulere 8y ago

Or examples loner ago: Apple ditching DVD drives or Apple ditching floppy drives.

nkkollaw 8y ago

> but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but they've been pulling this stuff for ages, and it doesn't look like people are going anywhere.

rsync 8y ago

"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." Interestingly, it drove me to buy three maxed-out 11" MBAs before they were discontinued. So I have not left the Apple computer platform but I won't be buying another laptop until I burn through these three - which could be as late as 2022-2023 ... As for fonts/aliasing - I just won't upgrade past Sierra (or whatever ... I use Mavericks now ...)