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Q&A with the developer of BetterDummy: from macOS secrets to his motivations

95 points by laktak 5y ago

disgu 5y ago
I remember having this issue a few years back with a 1080p display and a MacBook Pro from 2016. Connecting a Raspberry Pi Zero W yielded better display results than a $3k MacBook Pro, which was really disappointing. I can't believe it's still an issue to this day.
- aulin 5y ago
  that's a different issue altogether, this one is about macos not supporting 2k and 4k monitors native resolutions, that one was about antialiasing. At some point, when Retina was introduced, Apple decided to completely disable their subpixel hinting so low resolution monitors (if 1080p can be considered low) that can render sharp text on Linux and on Windows look ugly and blurry on macos
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >At some point, when Retina was introduced It was later than that, if I recall correctly it was available until Catalina although you did need to modify a config file to enable it.
    - aulin 5y ago
      Yep, they made it gradually less discoverable, leaving an option in system preferences first, then removing it and allowing to enable it from cmdline, then removing it altogether. I believe it went away completely with Big Sur.
albertopv 5y ago
These are issues I had with linux...so, I will just stick it :)
- aulin 5y ago
  at least linux has subpixel antialiasing so text still looks crisp on perfectly good full hd monitors...
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Gnome does have an option for fractional scaling but any legacy x11 apps will look blurry. Last I checked this was pretty much just electron and chrome holding things up.
  - albertopv 5y ago
    Ubuntu 21.10 doesn't recognise my asus qhd bought a year ago, max resolution detected is fhd, no issues with windows 10
  - hollerith 5y ago
    >just electron and chrome holding things up There are flags you can pass on the commandline to tell Chrome to bypass XWayand. I have been running Chrome (stable channel) that way for many months -- on Gnome 40 set to a fractional scaling factor. No blurriness.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
On the MacBook Air of my wife we had also display problems. If I remember correctly you had to press the option key somewhere on a click to get better resolutions. https://osxdaily.com/2015/08/27/show-all-display-resolutions-external-screen-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2015/08/27/show-all-display-resolutions... "Under the ‘Display’ tab, hold down the OPTION / ALT key while you press on the ‘Scaled’ button". Talk about UI. Before that we had spend quite some money on HDMI cables and USB-C to HDMI adapters and stuff blaming 3rd party products along the way.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I think this is probably intentional to try to get people to spend money on a Mac display.
  - ldrndll 5y ago
    When you say a "Mac" display, what are you referring to? Apple sells exactly one display - the XDR - and its pricing is such that no one casually buys because their $300 external display isn't working correctly. I very much doubt that is their motivation; it's likely just a (possibly misguided) effort to keep the UI simpler.
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      It was more of a $1500 external display ;-)
      - djhn 5y ago
        I'm confused. If this isn't a joke I don't get, would you mind sharing some advice on how to get it for that price?
        KingOfCoders 5y ago
        I have replied to "buys because their $300 external display isn't working" with the fact that our external display was $1500. I'm confused now :-)
cosmotic 5y ago
And here I thought this was going to be about the HDMI YCbCR issue. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-external-monitor-display-problem/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-externa...
least 5y ago
I know this is at least somewhat a software issue; as in on many monitors options for display scaling don't even appear. My Dell U3818DW does have retina scaling options, thankfully, but my Asus PG278Q did not when I was using it. I ended up following along to this article [1] to get some retina display options for it. With that being said, I think the larger issue is that there simply aren't that many high dpi external monitors available, and the ones that do exist are expensive. There are a ton of options for 4k panels in PC laptops that are like 13-17 inch and Apple's retina displays on their iMacs and Macbooks are also high dpi but I can count on my fingers how many true high dpi screens there are for external display options. Gamers don't really want higher resolution since GPUs can't drive them well natively and games don't really need the sharpness and I imagine that corporations buying hundreds of monitors at a time don't really care about it, either, especially since Windows renders text on them quite adequately. Mac users are certainly longing for some decent monitor options that aren't 5000 dollars, though. [1] https://medium.com/comsystoreply/force-hidpi-resolutions-for-dell-u2515h-monitor-5304e5506214 https://medium.com/comsystoreply/force-hidpi-resolutions-for...
- pedrocr 5y ago
  Here are 118 different 4K monitors starting at 240€: https://www.worten.pt/informatica-e-acessorios/monitores/monitores-pc?resolucao-monitores=4K+Ultra+HD+%283840x2160%29 https://www.worten.pt/informatica-e-acessorios/monitores/mon... I've bought 3 LG ones during the pandemic and they're great. What other options do you need?
  - aulin 5y ago
    can you confirm they work in retina mode with macs? e.g. anyone tried 27UL500 and can confirm text looks good?
    - 4ad 5y ago
      No, I tried these 4k@27 inch displays, and you can enable scaling, but it looks really really poor compared to my 5k iMac. 4k at 27 inch is not retina-quality, period. This is the only reason I use an iMac, I simply can't get an equally good display without paying €5k+. I understand that not everybody understands hiDPI displays, but it really grinds me gears to see low-resolution displays advertised as solutions to people who do understand hiDPI.
mdoms 5y ago
I would just like to plug my very very expensive 2 year old Intel MacBook Pro into a monitor without the fans immediately running at 100% and cooking my desk. A problem that has gone completely unacknowledged by Apple despite the several hundred pages of forum posts all over the web about it. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-16-is-hot-noisy-with-an-external-monitor.2211747/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-16-is-hot-noisy-wi...
- niffydroid 5y ago
  I had this with my mid 2015 macbook pro. Window server would be using 40% of my resources when using 2 external displays.
- Implicated 5y ago
  Plug the charger in on the right side. [1] 1. https://www.imore.com/heres-why-you-should-probably-charge-your-macbook-using-ports-its-right-side https://www.imore.com/heres-why-you-should-probably-charge-y...
  - smilespray 5y ago
    Nice to know, as I'm at this moment charging my 2020 top-spec Intel MBP from the left-side port. No matter. I'm going to sell it anyway. What a fan monster.
sgjohnson 5y ago
macOS still has a completely retarded implementation of DisplayPort MST (i.e. the only supported display is their own 6K display). It's been growing on me for years, as macOS is my favourite platform, but I could go on a full Linus Torvalds rant about this. Why the fuck can't I use my dockstation that has 2 DisplayPort outputs and 1x HDMI to connect 3 external monitors? It literally works on Windows on the same fucking machine. On macOS all you get is mirroring. So ultimately the reason is that Apple is completely oblivous to the millions of people who don't use monitors that are made or sold by Apple. Either oblivious or they flat out don't care.
- thefz 5y ago
  > So ultimately the reason is that Apple is completely oblivous to the millions of people who don't use monitors that are made or sold by Apple. Either oblivious or they flat out don't care. They are not strangers to limiting or breaking existing protocols or standards in favor of their own implementation, and then saying "see? Apple just works". Take their broken SMB implementation in OSX as an example.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Take their broken SMB implementation in OSX as an example. That doesn't make sense as they completely rewrote their SMB implementation to improve it.
    - fredoralive 5y ago
      Quite a lot of people would suspect that the the initial reason for reimplementing SMB on Mac OS X with smbx was that Samba chose to use GPLv3 for newer versions, rather than any direct technical reasons.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Unrelated but newer Macbook Pros (with M1 Max chips) as well as the Apple Pro Display XDR have entirely gotten rid of ICC profiles which seems crazy to me. Apple's definition of a professional is a more like a hipster. Real pros want no bullshit abstractions and hidden stuff, they want all knobs and switches exposed in all its glory. Btw, if you want to see how bad Apple Pro Display XDR is, look no further than the legendary HDTV Test channel on YT. Totally crushes Apple with straight up numbers and pure unadulterated objectivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU
- iSnow 5y ago
  Wait, do I get this right that M1 Macs cannot work with monitor calibration tools? I am not a graphics professional but my wife is and we are thinking about buying a M1 Mac - but she needs a calibrated display.
  - lstamour 5y ago
    ICC profiles still exist but maybe they don’t show by default? You might need to option-click to view settings if they go missing compared to previous macOS versions, I’ve been noticing a bit of a streamlining or reorg of settings in recent macOS releases. It’s still documented the normal way though https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlf3ddc60d/mac https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlf3ddc60d/... - and I can confirm it works still: I needed a specific HDMI output to be rec.709 as it was the only way to get a DVD-quality stream to play correctly on an older HDTV. And it worked great. I also haven’t heard any reports that X-Rite calibration software has stopped working or similar. As far as I know, works great. :)
- sunaurus 5y ago
  > Totally crushes Apple with straight up numbers and pure unadulterated objectivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU I don't know a lot about either of these monitors, but I don't find it surprising at all that a 30,000€ monitor would be better than a 6000€ monitor. Saying that the reviewer objectively crushes apple by using these two monitors in a comparison seems quite misleading.
DarthNebo 5y ago
I'm suffering with underscan on a 1440p monitor while using an intel MBA (2015). The mini-DP port would only work with a VGA adaptor & the 1080p resolution ends up with a vertical black bar on the left as a result of the underscan. No way to fix this either since macOS Monterey doesn't have any settings to change, ends up showing that a 40" HDTV is plugged in when it's just a 27" 1440p display...
- mgraupner 5y ago
  Ever tried this EDID patch? https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862 https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862 Had to run this script on every MacOS update till Big Sur or Catalina in order to get a perfect picture, otherwise MacOS would detect a TV and not a monitor.
  - DarthNebo 5y ago
    Thanks, I'll check if that fixes it.
deeblering4 5y ago
There’s no need to make ableist comments in a thread about computer monitors.
- LightHugger 5y ago
  This comment has no substance
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Ableist? Why does the US always ruin perfectly fine English words (if it's the one I'm thinking of)? In French for example there's no negative connotation for the same word, it's what you use if you're late for something... There's also a lot of perfectly fine technical uses for the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard I mean, go on any highway in Canada and there will be sections where 'retarder' breaks aren't allowed. Those going to get cancelled? Edit - also associating people with mental disability with that word was a slang usage in the first place, it was never the primary usage.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. You've done it a lot in the past, and your account seems unfortunately to be swerving back into it. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Gigachad 5y ago
  The google definition for retard is "delay or hold back in terms of progress or development." This exactly matches what the OP was trying to convey about the mac displayport implementation.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    Look up "retarded" in Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retarded https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retarded
pembrook 5y ago
I think Apple is trying to force the hand of monitor manufacturers towards 4k or higher. The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire. Buy the GHR1050PQS75-UHW204773! It’s got garbage white uniformity, terrible black levels and IPS glow, cheap plastic housing and settings software that feels like it was created in 1994. Wirecutter recommended! Compare this to the TV industry, where you can get amazing picture quality with OLED and at least somewhat decent levels of software competence. Meanwhile desktop monitors (something most of us spend 8 hours a day in front of) are stuck using 30 year old LCD tech and most aren’t even 4k yet. The entire PowerPoint/excel crowd seemingly has no problem spending most of their waking hours staring at giant pixels all day, even if the laptop screen they have sitting next to the monitor has almost 3X the pixel density.
- izacus 5y ago
  > The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire. I last few years we've seen a massive shift towards ultrawide, high (dynamic) frame rate and HDR screens from pretty much all manufacturers. Many of those technologies Apple just didn't support until recently. They still don't support DisplayPort MST for use of many bigger monitors in daisy configurations. So, what are you talking about? Did you even check the market outside the Apple store?
  - pembrook 5y ago
    Yes, I spent almost a month researching the entire market and every single offering available. Nearly every ultrawide you speak of has very poor pixel density. 4k spanned across 34+ inches diagonally looks pretty terrible when you view it at the distance most people sit from their monitors. I can’t seriously be the only one who can tell the difference. Have you ever compared how text looks on your phone or laptop screen compared to most monitors available today?
    - random314 5y ago
      Never thought I would see the time 4K isn't enough anymore!
nickpp 5y ago
Still can't understand why I can't buy a 5k/6k at 27", 30" or 32" display in the non-Mac world. 4K is a rather low DPI, and using it at 150% OS scaling is not that great. Apple offers such great displays for the MacBook and iMac, with non-fractional scaling and such a good density that sub-pixel anti-aliasing is no longer needed for text rendering. Why do I have ZERO options for that outside Apple's offers?!
- skohan 5y ago
  How close is your screen that 4k/27" seems like low DPI? What are you comparing it to? But I did monitor shopping recently, and what I wish I could get outside the mac world (or even in it) is the form-factor. Like there are a lot of very nice 4k HDR IPS displays out there today, but nothing I could find in the thin form-factor of an iMac or laptop display.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Regular distance on my desk, 75-100 cm I guess. I have a 32" since I want larger text at my age. But it doesn't compare to the Retina display on my MacBook: I can often see the pixels and scaling artefacts. What I would've liked was 5k at 32" for a perfect doubling of my preferred resolution: 2560x1440.
- pelorat 5y ago
  Because you get what, 60Hz at best on those Apple display. 60Hz is not enough any more.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    I like high frame rates, but if I have to choose, I will go for high pixel density every time. But I'm not a gamer. Here's to hoping that someday we'll get to enjoy both!
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    60 Hz is definitely enough. The vast majority of video content stops at 60 Hz. Applications and games may benefit from 120 or 144 Hz refresh rates, but for the latter, it also means that you're pushing a lot more pixels through your graphics card - which may well not keep up. IMO, 4K60 is a reasonable choice for those that prioritise resolution over refresh rate.
Gatsky 5y ago
BetterDummy solves mouse stutter on external displays as well! (M1 air with 1080p monitor) Does nobody at Apple use external monitors??
- nickpp 5y ago
  I'm guessing the use the 32" 6K XDR...
niffydroid 5y ago
I've got 2 AOC monitors (2369M + 2490W1), On my mid 2015 macbook pro I had no issues (apart from window server using all my resources when they were plugged in). I'm the new M1 Macbook pro(work laptop) I'm finding quite often I am getting small vertical bands on both monitors randomly, these are more noticeably when using dark themes. I've changed cables and colour profiles and not really fixed it. I've not had this with my old laptop or even my desktop pc. I would swap them out for 4k displays but it's just too expensive for me. I have been using my glasses more to use my monitors thinking my eyesight is getting worse but it could just be the monitors...
solarkraft 5y ago
My 4K monitor looks and works perfectly fine on my M1 Mac ... when it works. I've had many connection issues with the dongle I haven't had on another computer running Linux. Some days it just switches on and off seemingly randomly in the span of 10 seconds to 30 minutes. In the last few days it has been fine. I won't be surprised when it appears again.
harha 5y ago
Using Citrix is also catastrophic both on the 5K iMac and the Retina MacBook Pro (and probably others too). Not sure who's to blame for that. Curious to see if this tool solves the issue.

95 points by laktak 5y ago

I remember having this issue a few years back with a 1080p display and a MacBook Pro from 2016. Connecting a Raspberry Pi Zero W yielded better display results than a $3k MacBook Pro, which was really disappointing. I can't believe it's still an issue to this day.

aulin 5y ago
that's a different issue altogether, this one is about macos not supporting 2k and 4k monitors native resolutions, that one was about antialiasing. At some point, when Retina was introduced, Apple decided to completely disable their subpixel hinting so low resolution monitors (if 1080p can be considered low) that can render sharp text on Linux and on Windows look ugly and blurry on macos
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >At some point, when Retina was introduced It was later than that, if I recall correctly it was available until Catalina although you did need to modify a config file to enable it.
  - aulin 5y ago
    Yep, they made it gradually less discoverable, leaving an option in system preferences first, then removing it and allowing to enable it from cmdline, then removing it altogether. I believe it went away completely with Big Sur.

albertopv 5y ago

These are issues I had with linux...so, I will just stick it :)

aulin 5y ago
at least linux has subpixel antialiasing so text still looks crisp on perfectly good full hd monitors...
Gigachad 5y ago
Gnome does have an option for fractional scaling but any legacy x11 apps will look blurry. Last I checked this was pretty much just electron and chrome holding things up.
- albertopv 5y ago
  Ubuntu 21.10 doesn't recognise my asus qhd bought a year ago, max resolution detected is fhd, no issues with windows 10
- hollerith 5y ago
  >just electron and chrome holding things up There are flags you can pass on the commandline to tell Chrome to bypass XWayand. I have been running Chrome (stable channel) that way for many months -- on Gnome 40 set to a fractional scaling factor. No blurriness.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

On the MacBook Air of my wife we had also display problems. If I remember correctly you had to press the option key somewhere on a click to get better resolutions. https://osxdaily.com/2015/08/27/show-all-display-resolutions-external-screen-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2015/08/27/show-all-display-resolutions... "Under the ‘Display’ tab, hold down the OPTION / ALT key while you press on the ‘Scaled’ button". Talk about UI. Before that we had spend quite some money on HDMI cables and USB-C to HDMI adapters and stuff blaming 3rd party products along the way.

encryptluks2 5y ago
I think this is probably intentional to try to get people to spend money on a Mac display.
- ldrndll 5y ago
  When you say a "Mac" display, what are you referring to? Apple sells exactly one display - the XDR - and its pricing is such that no one casually buys because their $300 external display isn't working correctly. I very much doubt that is their motivation; it's likely just a (possibly misguided) effort to keep the UI simpler.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    It was more of a $1500 external display ;-)
    - djhn 5y ago
      I'm confused. If this isn't a joke I don't get, would you mind sharing some advice on how to get it for that price?
      - KingOfCoders 5y ago
        I have replied to "buys because their $300 external display isn't working" with the fact that our external display was $1500. I'm confused now :-)

cosmotic 5y ago

And here I thought this was going to be about the HDMI YCbCR issue. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-external-monitor-display-problem/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-externa...

least 5y ago

I know this is at least somewhat a software issue; as in on many monitors options for display scaling don't even appear. My Dell U3818DW does have retina scaling options, thankfully, but my Asus PG278Q did not when I was using it. I ended up following along to this article [1] to get some retina display options for it. With that being said, I think the larger issue is that there simply aren't that many high dpi external monitors available, and the ones that do exist are expensive. There are a ton of options for 4k panels in PC laptops that are like 13-17 inch and Apple's retina displays on their iMacs and Macbooks are also high dpi but I can count on my fingers how many true high dpi screens there are for external display options. Gamers don't really want higher resolution since GPUs can't drive them well natively and games don't really need the sharpness and I imagine that corporations buying hundreds of monitors at a time don't really care about it, either, especially since Windows renders text on them quite adequately. Mac users are certainly longing for some decent monitor options that aren't 5000 dollars, though. [1] https://medium.com/comsystoreply/force-hidpi-resolutions-for-dell-u2515h-monitor-5304e5506214 https://medium.com/comsystoreply/force-hidpi-resolutions-for...

pedrocr 5y ago
Here are 118 different 4K monitors starting at 240€: https://www.worten.pt/informatica-e-acessorios/monitores/monitores-pc?resolucao-monitores=4K+Ultra+HD+%283840x2160%29 https://www.worten.pt/informatica-e-acessorios/monitores/mon... I've bought 3 LG ones during the pandemic and they're great. What other options do you need?
- aulin 5y ago
  can you confirm they work in retina mode with macs? e.g. anyone tried 27UL500 and can confirm text looks good?
  - 4ad 5y ago
    No, I tried these 4k@27 inch displays, and you can enable scaling, but it looks really really poor compared to my 5k iMac. 4k at 27 inch is not retina-quality, period. This is the only reason I use an iMac, I simply can't get an equally good display without paying €5k+. I understand that not everybody understands hiDPI displays, but it really grinds me gears to see low-resolution displays advertised as solutions to people who do understand hiDPI.

mdoms 5y ago

I would just like to plug my very very expensive 2 year old Intel MacBook Pro into a monitor without the fans immediately running at 100% and cooking my desk. A problem that has gone completely unacknowledged by Apple despite the several hundred pages of forum posts all over the web about it. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-16-is-hot-noisy-with-an-external-monitor.2211747/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-16-is-hot-noisy-wi...

niffydroid 5y ago
I had this with my mid 2015 macbook pro. Window server would be using 40% of my resources when using 2 external displays.
Implicated 5y ago
Plug the charger in on the right side. [1] 1. https://www.imore.com/heres-why-you-should-probably-charge-your-macbook-using-ports-its-right-side https://www.imore.com/heres-why-you-should-probably-charge-y...
- smilespray 5y ago
  Nice to know, as I'm at this moment charging my 2020 top-spec Intel MBP from the left-side port. No matter. I'm going to sell it anyway. What a fan monster.

sgjohnson 5y ago

macOS still has a completely retarded implementation of DisplayPort MST (i.e. the only supported display is their own 6K display). It's been growing on me for years, as macOS is my favourite platform, but I could go on a full Linus Torvalds rant about this. Why the fuck can't I use my dockstation that has 2 DisplayPort outputs and 1x HDMI to connect 3 external monitors? It literally works on Windows on the same fucking machine. On macOS all you get is mirroring. So ultimately the reason is that Apple is completely oblivous to the millions of people who don't use monitors that are made or sold by Apple. Either oblivious or they flat out don't care.

thefz 5y ago
> So ultimately the reason is that Apple is completely oblivous to the millions of people who don't use monitors that are made or sold by Apple. Either oblivious or they flat out don't care. They are not strangers to limiting or breaking existing protocols or standards in favor of their own implementation, and then saying "see? Apple just works". Take their broken SMB implementation in OSX as an example.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >Take their broken SMB implementation in OSX as an example. That doesn't make sense as they completely rewrote their SMB implementation to improve it.
  - fredoralive 5y ago
    Quite a lot of people would suspect that the the initial reason for reimplementing SMB on Mac OS X with smbx was that Samba chose to use GPLv3 for newer versions, rather than any direct technical reasons.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Unrelated but newer Macbook Pros (with M1 Max chips) as well as the Apple Pro Display XDR have entirely gotten rid of ICC profiles which seems crazy to me. Apple's definition of a professional is a more like a hipster. Real pros want no bullshit abstractions and hidden stuff, they want all knobs and switches exposed in all its glory. Btw, if you want to see how bad Apple Pro Display XDR is, look no further than the legendary HDTV Test channel on YT. Totally crushes Apple with straight up numbers and pure unadulterated objectivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU

iSnow 5y ago
Wait, do I get this right that M1 Macs cannot work with monitor calibration tools? I am not a graphics professional but my wife is and we are thinking about buying a M1 Mac - but she needs a calibrated display.
- lstamour 5y ago
  ICC profiles still exist but maybe they don’t show by default? You might need to option-click to view settings if they go missing compared to previous macOS versions, I’ve been noticing a bit of a streamlining or reorg of settings in recent macOS releases. It’s still documented the normal way though https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlf3ddc60d/mac https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlf3ddc60d/... - and I can confirm it works still: I needed a specific HDMI output to be rec.709 as it was the only way to get a DVD-quality stream to play correctly on an older HDTV. And it worked great. I also haven’t heard any reports that X-Rite calibration software has stopped working or similar. As far as I know, works great. :)
sunaurus 5y ago
> Totally crushes Apple with straight up numbers and pure unadulterated objectivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU I don't know a lot about either of these monitors, but I don't find it surprising at all that a 30,000€ monitor would be better than a 6000€ monitor. Saying that the reviewer objectively crushes apple by using these two monitors in a comparison seems quite misleading.

DarthNebo 5y ago

I'm suffering with underscan on a 1440p monitor while using an intel MBA (2015). The mini-DP port would only work with a VGA adaptor & the 1080p resolution ends up with a vertical black bar on the left as a result of the underscan. No way to fix this either since macOS Monterey doesn't have any settings to change, ends up showing that a 40" HDTV is plugged in when it's just a 27" 1440p display...

mgraupner 5y ago
Ever tried this EDID patch? https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862 https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862 Had to run this script on every MacOS update till Big Sur or Catalina in order to get a perfect picture, otherwise MacOS would detect a TV and not a monitor.
- DarthNebo 5y ago
  Thanks, I'll check if that fixes it.

deeblering4 5y ago

There’s no need to make ableist comments in a thread about computer monitors.

LightHugger 5y ago
This comment has no substance
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Mikeb85 5y ago
Ableist? Why does the US always ruin perfectly fine English words (if it's the one I'm thinking of)? In French for example there's no negative connotation for the same word, it's what you use if you're late for something... There's also a lot of perfectly fine technical uses for the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard I mean, go on any highway in Canada and there will be sections where 'retarder' breaks aren't allowed. Those going to get cancelled? Edit - also associating people with mental disability with that word was a slang usage in the first place, it was never the primary usage.
- dang 5y ago
  Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. You've done it a lot in the past, and your account seems unfortunately to be swerving back into it. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Gigachad 5y ago
The google definition for retard is "delay or hold back in terms of progress or development." This exactly matches what the OP was trying to convey about the mac displayport implementation.
- smilespray 5y ago
  Look up "retarded" in Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retarded https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retarded

pembrook 5y ago

I think Apple is trying to force the hand of monitor manufacturers towards 4k or higher. The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire. Buy the GHR1050PQS75-UHW204773! It’s got garbage white uniformity, terrible black levels and IPS glow, cheap plastic housing and settings software that feels like it was created in 1994. Wirecutter recommended! Compare this to the TV industry, where you can get amazing picture quality with OLED and at least somewhat decent levels of software competence. Meanwhile desktop monitors (something most of us spend 8 hours a day in front of) are stuck using 30 year old LCD tech and most aren’t even 4k yet. The entire PowerPoint/excel crowd seemingly has no problem spending most of their waking hours staring at giant pixels all day, even if the laptop screen they have sitting next to the monitor has almost 3X the pixel density.

izacus 5y ago
> The entire external monitor industry is such a no-innovation, customer-hostile dumpster fire. I last few years we've seen a massive shift towards ultrawide, high (dynamic) frame rate and HDR screens from pretty much all manufacturers. Many of those technologies Apple just didn't support until recently. They still don't support DisplayPort MST for use of many bigger monitors in daisy configurations. So, what are you talking about? Did you even check the market outside the Apple store?
- pembrook 5y ago
  Yes, I spent almost a month researching the entire market and every single offering available. Nearly every ultrawide you speak of has very poor pixel density. 4k spanned across 34+ inches diagonally looks pretty terrible when you view it at the distance most people sit from their monitors. I can’t seriously be the only one who can tell the difference. Have you ever compared how text looks on your phone or laptop screen compared to most monitors available today?
  - random314 5y ago
    Never thought I would see the time 4K isn't enough anymore!

nickpp 5y ago

Still can't understand why I can't buy a 5k/6k at 27", 30" or 32" display in the non-Mac world. 4K is a rather low DPI, and using it at 150% OS scaling is not that great. Apple offers such great displays for the MacBook and iMac, with non-fractional scaling and such a good density that sub-pixel anti-aliasing is no longer needed for text rendering. Why do I have ZERO options for that outside Apple's offers?!

skohan 5y ago
How close is your screen that 4k/27" seems like low DPI? What are you comparing it to? But I did monitor shopping recently, and what I wish I could get outside the mac world (or even in it) is the form-factor. Like there are a lot of very nice 4k HDR IPS displays out there today, but nothing I could find in the thin form-factor of an iMac or laptop display.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Regular distance on my desk, 75-100 cm I guess. I have a 32" since I want larger text at my age. But it doesn't compare to the Retina display on my MacBook: I can often see the pixels and scaling artefacts. What I would've liked was 5k at 32" for a perfect doubling of my preferred resolution: 2560x1440.
pelorat 5y ago
Because you get what, 60Hz at best on those Apple display. 60Hz is not enough any more.
- nickpp 5y ago
  I like high frame rates, but if I have to choose, I will go for high pixel density every time. But I'm not a gamer. Here's to hoping that someday we'll get to enjoy both!
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  60 Hz is definitely enough. The vast majority of video content stops at 60 Hz. Applications and games may benefit from 120 or 144 Hz refresh rates, but for the latter, it also means that you're pushing a lot more pixels through your graphics card - which may well not keep up. IMO, 4K60 is a reasonable choice for those that prioritise resolution over refresh rate.

Gatsky 5y ago

BetterDummy solves mouse stutter on external displays as well! (M1 air with 1080p monitor) Does nobody at Apple use external monitors??

nickpp 5y ago
I'm guessing the use the 32" 6K XDR...

niffydroid 5y ago

I've got 2 AOC monitors (2369M + 2490W1), On my mid 2015 macbook pro I had no issues (apart from window server using all my resources when they were plugged in). I'm the new M1 Macbook pro(work laptop) I'm finding quite often I am getting small vertical bands on both monitors randomly, these are more noticeably when using dark themes. I've changed cables and colour profiles and not really fixed it. I've not had this with my old laptop or even my desktop pc. I would swap them out for 4k displays but it's just too expensive for me. I have been using my glasses more to use my monitors thinking my eyesight is getting worse but it could just be the monitors...

solarkraft 5y ago

My 4K monitor looks and works perfectly fine on my M1 Mac ... when it works. I've had many connection issues with the dongle I haven't had on another computer running Linux. Some days it just switches on and off seemingly randomly in the span of 10 seconds to 30 minutes. In the last few days it has been fine. I won't be surprised when it appears again.

harha 5y ago

Using Citrix is also catastrophic both on the 5K iMac and the Retina MacBook Pro (and probably others too). Not sure who's to blame for that. Curious to see if this tool solves the issue.