7 ms·

Would buy in a heartbeat if it had a 4k display. Hard to go back to 1080p after six years of Retina and 4K displays.

the-nozzle 6y ago
I know, eh ? Why is every linux laptop manufacturer insistent on using panels that they fished out of a dumpster behind a 7-11 ?
Macha 6y ago
Honestly find it hard to notice much difference in the display quality between my 1080p 2018 XPS laptop and my 1800p 2019 Mac laptop. Actually the XPS is slightly preferable to me because the matte vs glossy finish outweighs the extra resolution at that size for me. I guess that could just be my sight, but the reviews for the XPS laptop vs the 4k model of the same were pretty much unanimous on the 4k variant being a waste of battery for a neglible return on image quality, so it's at least not a fringe view
- justaguy88 6y ago
  > could just be my sight It is 1080p to 4k is such a large difference
  - eertami 6y ago
    Really? On a 13" display? I bet in a blind AB test at a normal viewing distance you wouldn't even be able to accurately tell me which is which.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      I would bet money on you being wrong at 2-3 feet away
    - bscphil 6y ago
      There's no need to bicker about this. A 13 inch display at 4K has about 340 pixels per inch along the diagonal. At 1080p it would have about 170 pixels per inch. Perfect vision is usually understood to be the ability to discern details of about 1/60 of a degree, or 0.29 milliradians. By the arc length formula (s=rθ), we find that the distance needed to precisely align this angle with the level of detail provided by a 1080p screen is about 20 inches. In other words, if you sit closer than 20 inches away from your screen (perhaps not that unlikely for a laptop), you might be able to discern details beyond the 1080p level. This would only be possible for extremely contrast sensitive small details, like text in a small font size at 1:1 (no DPI scaling). So... it's a bit complicated, but I suspect 1080p would be good enough for nearly everyone at 13 inches, but move up to 15 inches and I could see many people preferring 1440p.
      - samatman 6y ago
        This isn't a complete analysis. High DPI screens are able to render text without aliasing, and that makes a significant difference, especially with less-than-perfect eyesight. What you're saying is true insofar as I had to squint up to a 1080p screen at 13" to actually see the pixels. But everything was slightly blurry, and switching to a "Retina" (1600p iirc) screen fixed that. Which was the lack of subpixel aliasing: you can make those screens look blurry as well, by turning it back on. But a 1080 without it just looks like it has janky text rendering. An actual 4K screen is unnecessary at 13", imho, but the extra pixels are harmless except in battery life. I do detect a real difference in textual rendering between 170ppi and 227, because it's the difference between leaning on subpixel aliasing and turning it off while still getting good results.
      - anon4237 6y ago
        I never understood the "eye resolution=screen resolution -> good enough argument". First of all the cone spacing in the fovea is around 31arcsec or about half the arcmin you assume. IMO that is more relevant than the 20/20 vision number because that number is not based on any intrinsic quantisation of the visual system but rather mostly limited by blur which tends to be very much not gausian -> not an ideal low pass filter for most eyes. Now consider the nyquist shannon sampling theorem that tells us that any signal we want to fully capture needs to be sampled at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency of interest. So if we want to be able to fully represent any state of our visual system on a display we need at least twice the resolution of our visual system (ignoring for a minute that that assumes an ideal lpf which your eye is not as stated above). so already 4x your 1arcmin resolution number. But that all quickly becomes rather theoretical when you look at jagged elephant in the room: aliasing and scaling! a lot of what we look at is either rendered with pixel precision being very prone to aliasing at scales that are much much larger than your pixel pitch (see this worst case demonstration https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility) or image or video files that might be displayed at a size that isn't an integer multiple or fraction of its native resolution. scaling just like aliasing causes artifacts that go way beyond the scale of your pixel pitch and one way to mitigate the issue is to just have a very high target resolution to scale too. So yeah I don't thing "can't distinguish individual pixels" is a meaningful threshold and even way beyond that there is still benefit to be had even for those with less than perfect eyesight
    - lbotos 6y ago
      I went from a 27" 4k display to a 27" 2k display on my desk and I notice the difference every day. I only switched for higher refresh rate. The biggest thing keeping me on my Macbook is it's hard to find a 13 inch, hi dpi, close as possible to mac keyboard laptop. The Razer 13 inch was sooo close but they made tilde and backslash half keys for some reason.... https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/keyboard-clickpad2.jpg https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/k...
    - 3np 6y ago
      I use small text. Readability absolutely improves around the 8-10px ranges. Especially with Chinese/Japanese characters, these can sometimes become unreadable on smaller fonts on 1080p. I have two 14” Thinkpads I switch between which have almost identical setups, but one is 1080p and one is 1440. I’m not buying another 1080p if I can avoid it. And yes I have been tweaking fonts and X11 quite a bit already.
    - lenkite 6y ago
      Can't find any results for 13" displays. But there have already been several blind tests carried out for TV's that show people can make out the difference. http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-page-1/ https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-pa... https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-the-difference--Test-gives--15673.html https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-...
    - indymike 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure most people see a huge difference between a old-style MacBook Air screen and a MacBook Pro screen. The Air is a 1080p 13in display. The Pro isn't even 4k, but the difference is extremely noticeable, especially if you are looking at a document or code (even from 24-36 in away). Seeing the difference between Apple's retina display and 4k? Well, that is difficult.
    - can16358p 6y ago
      Would love to take the test. I can bet all my life savings that I will be able to tell the difference on first second. Difference between those resolutions is HUGE and I immediately see the difference.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      And people can’t really tell 30fps from 60fps from 120fps either, right? Once you see and appreciate the difference, you can’t unsee it. Anything less is jarring. Print media figured out three to four decades ago that print buyers prefer at least 144 lpi for black shapes, at least 300-600 dpi for grey images, and minimally 300 dpi but ideally 1200 dpi for colour photos people will consider high quality. (Note: For reader convenience I’m mixing lines per inch or lpi with dots per inch or dpi here, lines is per screen but there may be several screens per image, so dpi is the source material you’re trying to reproduce with screens.) We’ve been settling on computer screen quality for too long. If all we did was video, fine, but we spend most time simulating print.
- joshuaengler 6y ago
  It could be your sight, or the size of your display. You never mentioned how big it was. If it's a monster 18" laptop then the difference between 1080 and 4k is a lot more significant than if it's a 14" display where you almost can't even tell the difference. It's all about pixels per inch. I always prefer higher quality pixels as opposed to more of them, I don't mind 1080p if it's extremely accurate colour and amazing viewing angles, but that's just me.
  - Macha 6y ago
    That's fair. I can notice the difference between 1080p and 1440p on my desktop monitors which are 27" (or between the 1080p monitor and the 1080p laptop). Both laptops are 15".
- deckard1 6y ago
  > the XPS is slightly preferable to me because the matte vs glossy finish outweighs the extra resolution at that size for me. I have a ThinkPad, and this has been my experience. Sitting next to my Macbook Pro 13" retina, there is not much difference. 14" 16:9 1080p vs. 13" 16:10 1600p. The matte finish + slight diagonal increase closes the gap between the two. Unless you're in your 20s with perfect vision, I doubt the average person could tell a visual difference between the two. I will also say that at 13", the difference between 16:9 and 16:10 is practically nonexistent. Especially 14" vs 13". I thought this would be a major issue for me. But it's not. On a 27" desktop monitor? Sure, that can make a difference.
- willis936 6y ago
  I have an XPS 15 from around the same time and the 1080p display feels a little poor. What I notice most is the long pixel response time. I'd take a 1080p OLED over a 4K LCD anyday. I'd also take a 4K OLED over either any day as well. High refresh rate and/or backlight strobing would be nice to have as well. Battery life isn't as much of a concern to me. I know not all users have the same priority as me. It's nice that consumers have options.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    > 1080p OLED Yep. What's getting lost in this whole discussion over resolution and whether >1080p is necessary is the issue of panel quality. Most laptops have always had absolute shit that is useless for photo editing or color-accurate work. Even at the high end they rarely advertise things like gamut coverage.
    - Macha 6y ago
      Does anyone sell an OLED laptop display? I thought it was just in phones and giant TVs still. The standard today is pretty much that good laptops are IPS and bad laptops are TN
      - detaro 6y ago
        I've seen options with OLED from HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus and Razer (always on a few select models though).
- asiachick 6y ago
  There's a big difference when it comes to trying to read complex characters 贅沢な醬油の会社の面接体験を受けようとしています。 I absolutely hate viewing text on my LO-DPI PC vs my 6 year old HD-DPI Macbook Pro or either my 4 year old android smartphone or my 1 year old iPhone or my 7 year old iPad. It's like playing a NES game vs a PS4 Game. Sure some are fun and it's nostalgic but the world as moved on and lo-res is old.
  - indymike 6y ago
    "lo-res is old" This is exactly what the product people who are building blazing fast, high spec laptops with top-of-the-line circa 2006 displays need to hear.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Theoretically the best balance between high resolution (you can't see any single "normal" pixel anymore at normal viewing distance and normal eye sight) and battery usage is 1440p. But support for 1440p on Linux (and as far as I know not just Linux) is crap. Anyway in my experience having a high quality display is much much much more important then the display resolution (as long as it's at least 1080p).
  - Macha 6y ago
    I'm curious what support you think 1440p needs specially or where you think Linux falls down? I've got a 1440p primary monitor for my desktop and the only device to have issues with it is my PS4 pro which only supports 1080p or 4k video out even though 4k mode if often upscaled 1440p
    - dathinab 6y ago
      Wayland currently only supports integral scaling, so as long as you don't want the content on the screen to be noticeable smaller (no scaling) or bigger (scaling by 2) you have a problem. Sure some wayland implementations do support fractional scaling but only in a way which leads to not so crisp fonts and images (scaling by 2 and then down scaling the pixel output to the given 1.x scaling factor), which defeats the whole point of getting a higher resolution screen. Sure if your 1440p screen is also size wise bigger this might not matter but then my argument was always about increasing resolution without increasing monitor size. E.g. like a 1440p14" Laptop or similar. Also a perfect size scaling on a 1440p14" to make the UI be the same size as on a 1080p14" monitor is technically impossible, through there are ways to get solutions which are good enough anyway (but not scaling to exactly the same size but something close by, separately for each font and other elements in a UI). And while X impl. might work better, lets be honest X is dead. Still used, sure, but dead anyway.
      - kaba0 6y ago
        The non-crisp rendering is only true if you use xwayland applications. Wayland apps support fractional scaling.
dabernathy89 6y ago
I find it weird that non-Mac laptops either come with 1080 or 4k display options. Mac displays look incredible, and the 16" MBP resolution is 3072 × 1920 - basically 70% of the pixels on a 4k monitor.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Indeed as backend developer screen real estate is much more important than super accurate colour or viewing angles.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Do you run your mac at native res? The default is 900p with pixel doubling (and some fonts at native res). Basically anything other than doubled or native has a performance and battery life penalty relative to those two modes. This has less space than 4k at 200% (normal for 15") or 1080p at 100%.
  - szatkus 6y ago
    I'm a backend developer as well (or maybe full-stack, hard to say) and I switched my 4k to 1080p long time ago, because it wasn't worth it. On the other hand I like good viewing angles and nice colors. Unfortunately the latter isn't too good in basically every laptop I tried and... my current monitor (eh).
    - bavell 6y ago
      Full-stack dev here, running 1x1080 23" (top) + 3x1440 27". No real interest in moving to 4k, 1440 is the sweet spot for my workstation. The only problem... need more monitors!!
- dsego 6y ago
  I think it's to avoid fractional scaling.
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
elchief 6y ago
you don't need 4k for retina at that size. 2880x1600 (3k?) will do 221 ppi
- Ombudsman 6y ago
  4k will also absolutely destroy battery life, 3k is a good compromise
deleted 6y ago
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Shorel 6y ago
Do you want just 20 minutes of battery charge or what?
- Sephr 6y ago
  4K laptops can have reasonable battery life. See almost every>= 4K Ice Lake and Tiger Lake laptop for example.
rbanffy 6y ago
It depends on your age. At 50, even 768x1366 would be good enough if it had fractional scaling. ;-) Now, seriously, I find it hard to see the difference between 1080 and 4K. What would be nice is a good HDR display panel.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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LockAndLol 6y ago
If somebody zoomed everything out on a 15 inch screen, would you be able to tell the difference? Have you done the test?
can16358p 6y ago
Yup, 1080p was the first thing I saw. We're in 2021 and 1080p should be considered obsolete by now, yet still many new laptops come in 1080p.

I know, eh ? Why is every linux laptop manufacturer insistent on using panels that they fished out of a dumpster behind a 7-11 ?

Macha 6y ago

Honestly find it hard to notice much difference in the display quality between my 1080p 2018 XPS laptop and my 1800p 2019 Mac laptop. Actually the XPS is slightly preferable to me because the matte vs glossy finish outweighs the extra resolution at that size for me. I guess that could just be my sight, but the reviews for the XPS laptop vs the 4k model of the same were pretty much unanimous on the 4k variant being a waste of battery for a neglible return on image quality, so it's at least not a fringe view

justaguy88 6y ago
> could just be my sight It is 1080p to 4k is such a large difference
- eertami 6y ago
  Really? On a 13" display? I bet in a blind AB test at a normal viewing distance you wouldn't even be able to accurately tell me which is which.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    I would bet money on you being wrong at 2-3 feet away
  - bscphil 6y ago
    There's no need to bicker about this. A 13 inch display at 4K has about 340 pixels per inch along the diagonal. At 1080p it would have about 170 pixels per inch. Perfect vision is usually understood to be the ability to discern details of about 1/60 of a degree, or 0.29 milliradians. By the arc length formula (s=rθ), we find that the distance needed to precisely align this angle with the level of detail provided by a 1080p screen is about 20 inches. In other words, if you sit closer than 20 inches away from your screen (perhaps not that unlikely for a laptop), you might be able to discern details beyond the 1080p level. This would only be possible for extremely contrast sensitive small details, like text in a small font size at 1:1 (no DPI scaling). So... it's a bit complicated, but I suspect 1080p would be good enough for nearly everyone at 13 inches, but move up to 15 inches and I could see many people preferring 1440p.
    - samatman 6y ago
      This isn't a complete analysis. High DPI screens are able to render text without aliasing, and that makes a significant difference, especially with less-than-perfect eyesight. What you're saying is true insofar as I had to squint up to a 1080p screen at 13" to actually see the pixels. But everything was slightly blurry, and switching to a "Retina" (1600p iirc) screen fixed that. Which was the lack of subpixel aliasing: you can make those screens look blurry as well, by turning it back on. But a 1080 without it just looks like it has janky text rendering. An actual 4K screen is unnecessary at 13", imho, but the extra pixels are harmless except in battery life. I do detect a real difference in textual rendering between 170ppi and 227, because it's the difference between leaning on subpixel aliasing and turning it off while still getting good results.
    - anon4237 6y ago
      I never understood the "eye resolution=screen resolution -> good enough argument". First of all the cone spacing in the fovea is around 31arcsec or about half the arcmin you assume. IMO that is more relevant than the 20/20 vision number because that number is not based on any intrinsic quantisation of the visual system but rather mostly limited by blur which tends to be very much not gausian -> not an ideal low pass filter for most eyes. Now consider the nyquist shannon sampling theorem that tells us that any signal we want to fully capture needs to be sampled at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency of interest. So if we want to be able to fully represent any state of our visual system on a display we need at least twice the resolution of our visual system (ignoring for a minute that that assumes an ideal lpf which your eye is not as stated above). so already 4x your 1arcmin resolution number. But that all quickly becomes rather theoretical when you look at jagged elephant in the room: aliasing and scaling! a lot of what we look at is either rendered with pixel precision being very prone to aliasing at scales that are much much larger than your pixel pitch (see this worst case demonstration https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility) or image or video files that might be displayed at a size that isn't an integer multiple or fraction of its native resolution. scaling just like aliasing causes artifacts that go way beyond the scale of your pixel pitch and one way to mitigate the issue is to just have a very high target resolution to scale too. So yeah I don't thing "can't distinguish individual pixels" is a meaningful threshold and even way beyond that there is still benefit to be had even for those with less than perfect eyesight
  - lbotos 6y ago
    I went from a 27" 4k display to a 27" 2k display on my desk and I notice the difference every day. I only switched for higher refresh rate. The biggest thing keeping me on my Macbook is it's hard to find a 13 inch, hi dpi, close as possible to mac keyboard laptop. The Razer 13 inch was sooo close but they made tilde and backslash half keys for some reason.... https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/keyboard-clickpad2.jpg https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/k...
  - 3np 6y ago
    I use small text. Readability absolutely improves around the 8-10px ranges. Especially with Chinese/Japanese characters, these can sometimes become unreadable on smaller fonts on 1080p. I have two 14” Thinkpads I switch between which have almost identical setups, but one is 1080p and one is 1440. I’m not buying another 1080p if I can avoid it. And yes I have been tweaking fonts and X11 quite a bit already.
  - lenkite 6y ago
    Can't find any results for 13" displays. But there have already been several blind tests carried out for TV's that show people can make out the difference. http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-page-1/ https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-pa... https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-the-difference--Test-gives--15673.html https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-...
  - indymike 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure most people see a huge difference between a old-style MacBook Air screen and a MacBook Pro screen. The Air is a 1080p 13in display. The Pro isn't even 4k, but the difference is extremely noticeable, especially if you are looking at a document or code (even from 24-36 in away). Seeing the difference between Apple's retina display and 4k? Well, that is difficult.
  - can16358p 6y ago
    Would love to take the test. I can bet all my life savings that I will be able to tell the difference on first second. Difference between those resolutions is HUGE and I immediately see the difference.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    And people can’t really tell 30fps from 60fps from 120fps either, right? Once you see and appreciate the difference, you can’t unsee it. Anything less is jarring. Print media figured out three to four decades ago that print buyers prefer at least 144 lpi for black shapes, at least 300-600 dpi for grey images, and minimally 300 dpi but ideally 1200 dpi for colour photos people will consider high quality. (Note: For reader convenience I’m mixing lines per inch or lpi with dots per inch or dpi here, lines is per screen but there may be several screens per image, so dpi is the source material you’re trying to reproduce with screens.) We’ve been settling on computer screen quality for too long. If all we did was video, fine, but we spend most time simulating print.
joshuaengler 6y ago
It could be your sight, or the size of your display. You never mentioned how big it was. If it's a monster 18" laptop then the difference between 1080 and 4k is a lot more significant than if it's a 14" display where you almost can't even tell the difference. It's all about pixels per inch. I always prefer higher quality pixels as opposed to more of them, I don't mind 1080p if it's extremely accurate colour and amazing viewing angles, but that's just me.
- Macha 6y ago
  That's fair. I can notice the difference between 1080p and 1440p on my desktop monitors which are 27" (or between the 1080p monitor and the 1080p laptop). Both laptops are 15".
deckard1 6y ago
> the XPS is slightly preferable to me because the matte vs glossy finish outweighs the extra resolution at that size for me. I have a ThinkPad, and this has been my experience. Sitting next to my Macbook Pro 13" retina, there is not much difference. 14" 16:9 1080p vs. 13" 16:10 1600p. The matte finish + slight diagonal increase closes the gap between the two. Unless you're in your 20s with perfect vision, I doubt the average person could tell a visual difference between the two. I will also say that at 13", the difference between 16:9 and 16:10 is practically nonexistent. Especially 14" vs 13". I thought this would be a major issue for me. But it's not. On a 27" desktop monitor? Sure, that can make a difference.
willis936 6y ago
I have an XPS 15 from around the same time and the 1080p display feels a little poor. What I notice most is the long pixel response time. I'd take a 1080p OLED over a 4K LCD anyday. I'd also take a 4K OLED over either any day as well. High refresh rate and/or backlight strobing would be nice to have as well. Battery life isn't as much of a concern to me. I know not all users have the same priority as me. It's nice that consumers have options.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > 1080p OLED Yep. What's getting lost in this whole discussion over resolution and whether >1080p is necessary is the issue of panel quality. Most laptops have always had absolute shit that is useless for photo editing or color-accurate work. Even at the high end they rarely advertise things like gamut coverage.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Does anyone sell an OLED laptop display? I thought it was just in phones and giant TVs still. The standard today is pretty much that good laptops are IPS and bad laptops are TN
    - detaro 6y ago
      I've seen options with OLED from HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus and Razer (always on a few select models though).
asiachick 6y ago
There's a big difference when it comes to trying to read complex characters 贅沢な醬油の会社の面接体験を受けようとしています。 I absolutely hate viewing text on my LO-DPI PC vs my 6 year old HD-DPI Macbook Pro or either my 4 year old android smartphone or my 1 year old iPhone or my 7 year old iPad. It's like playing a NES game vs a PS4 Game. Sure some are fun and it's nostalgic but the world as moved on and lo-res is old.
- indymike 6y ago
  "lo-res is old" This is exactly what the product people who are building blazing fast, high spec laptops with top-of-the-line circa 2006 displays need to hear.
dathinab 6y ago
Theoretically the best balance between high resolution (you can't see any single "normal" pixel anymore at normal viewing distance and normal eye sight) and battery usage is 1440p. But support for 1440p on Linux (and as far as I know not just Linux) is crap. Anyway in my experience having a high quality display is much much much more important then the display resolution (as long as it's at least 1080p).
- Macha 6y ago
  I'm curious what support you think 1440p needs specially or where you think Linux falls down? I've got a 1440p primary monitor for my desktop and the only device to have issues with it is my PS4 pro which only supports 1080p or 4k video out even though 4k mode if often upscaled 1440p
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Wayland currently only supports integral scaling, so as long as you don't want the content on the screen to be noticeable smaller (no scaling) or bigger (scaling by 2) you have a problem. Sure some wayland implementations do support fractional scaling but only in a way which leads to not so crisp fonts and images (scaling by 2 and then down scaling the pixel output to the given 1.x scaling factor), which defeats the whole point of getting a higher resolution screen. Sure if your 1440p screen is also size wise bigger this might not matter but then my argument was always about increasing resolution without increasing monitor size. E.g. like a 1440p14" Laptop or similar. Also a perfect size scaling on a 1440p14" to make the UI be the same size as on a 1080p14" monitor is technically impossible, through there are ways to get solutions which are good enough anyway (but not scaling to exactly the same size but something close by, separately for each font and other elements in a UI). And while X impl. might work better, lets be honest X is dead. Still used, sure, but dead anyway.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      The non-crisp rendering is only true if you use xwayland applications. Wayland apps support fractional scaling.

dabernathy89 6y ago

I find it weird that non-Mac laptops either come with 1080 or 4k display options. Mac displays look incredible, and the 16" MBP resolution is 3072 × 1920 - basically 70% of the pixels on a 4k monitor.

dzhiurgis 6y ago
Indeed as backend developer screen real estate is much more important than super accurate colour or viewing angles.
- Macha 6y ago
  Do you run your mac at native res? The default is 900p with pixel doubling (and some fonts at native res). Basically anything other than doubled or native has a performance and battery life penalty relative to those two modes. This has less space than 4k at 200% (normal for 15") or 1080p at 100%.
- szatkus 6y ago
  I'm a backend developer as well (or maybe full-stack, hard to say) and I switched my 4k to 1080p long time ago, because it wasn't worth it. On the other hand I like good viewing angles and nice colors. Unfortunately the latter isn't too good in basically every laptop I tried and... my current monitor (eh).
  - bavell 6y ago
    Full-stack dev here, running 1x1080 23" (top) + 3x1440 27". No real interest in moving to 4k, 1440 is the sweet spot for my workstation. The only problem... need more monitors!!
dsego 6y ago
I think it's to avoid fractional scaling.
- chrismorgan 6y ago

elchief 6y ago

you don't need 4k for retina at that size. 2880x1600 (3k?) will do 221 ppi

Ombudsman 6y ago
4k will also absolutely destroy battery life, 3k is a good compromise

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Shorel 6y ago

Do you want just 20 minutes of battery charge or what?

Sephr 6y ago
4K laptops can have reasonable battery life. See almost every>= 4K Ice Lake and Tiger Lake laptop for example.

rbanffy 6y ago

It depends on your age. At 50, even 768x1366 would be good enough if it had fractional scaling. ;-) Now, seriously, I find it hard to see the difference between 1080 and 4K. What would be nice is a good HDR display panel.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LockAndLol 6y ago

If somebody zoomed everything out on a 15 inch screen, would you be able to tell the difference? Have you done the test?

can16358p 6y ago

Yup, 1080p was the first thing I saw. We're in 2021 and 1080p should be considered obsolete by now, yet still many new laptops come in 1080p.