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Makes me think of the "common knowledge" that Macs don't work properly with external monitors. Fuzzy fonts etc

kmeisthax 4y ago
That's moreso because Apple has a Strongly Held Belief that UIs should never render at fractional scale factors. If it needs to be 150%, it will render a larger virtual desktop at 200% and then downscale. Contrary to Apple, monitor manufacturers have a Strongly Held Belief that monitors should all be one marketable resolution (e.g. 4K) and shape (16:9 widescreen or wider) and users just pick a size. Bigger monitors shouldn't have more pixels in them. The Apple philosophy says that 4K 27" monitors are fundamentally broken hardware that the OS needs to fix at the cost of some display clarity. The manufacturer philosophy says that DisplayPort can't run 5K off a single cable[0] and that nobody wants letterboxing when watching a movie on their new laptop. Apple designs the monitor around what the OS and user need while display manufacturers design around whatever they can buy and repackage. Of course macOS has fuzzy fonts even at 1x, but that's not a display problem. That's a different Strongly Held Belief. Microsoft deliberately bends fonts to fit the pixel grid (they call this ClearType) while Apple uses antialiasing to remain faithful to the glyph shapes as they were originally designed. [0] Or at least this was true as of the release of the iMac 5K almost a decade ago. This is not true anymore but no manufacturer is touching 5K anyway.
- politelemon 4y ago
  This is typical but poor gymnastics which grants benefit of the doubt to brand loyalty. Manufacturers hold no such belief, they are beholden to standards to cater to a wide variety of configurations and setups. Implying it's not made for users is poor form, and simply false.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    If this were true then companies other than Apple would offer monitors that actually do cater to non-broken configurations but they don’t. The parent post does a great job explaining the technical trade-offs and economy of scale optimisations that manufacturers have decided to make, whereas you have only an ad-hominem attack to offer.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  Problem is that fractional scale factors are broken, unless your GUI is completely vector-based. While OS can render texts and vector graphics on fractional scales, bitmaps has to be scaled, which makes them blurry.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Bitmap scaling doesn't become blurry if you have enough resolution (e.g. going from 2x to 1.5x is fine). Vector scaling breaks because layout calculations don't take the pixel grid into account. The most egregious example of this is CSS floats, where browsers have to do all sorts of hacks to ensure that percentages still add up to 100% after rounding. Otherwise fractional zoom factors cause layouts to have pixel gaps or overflow onto other pages. Fonts get around this with hinting but there's no way to hint a CSS layout.
- trasz 4y ago
  I'd attribute this to the fact that the way technology is organised follows how the groups of people who develop it are organised. The Ghost Of The New Machine thing; "if you put database folks and kernel folks into the same office, you'll end up with parts of database in the kernel".

That's moreso because Apple has a Strongly Held Belief that UIs should never render at fractional scale factors. If it needs to be 150%, it will render a larger virtual desktop at 200% and then downscale. Contrary to Apple, monitor manufacturers have a Strongly Held Belief that monitors should all be one marketable resolution (e.g. 4K) and shape (16:9 widescreen or wider) and users just pick a size. Bigger monitors shouldn't have more pixels in them. The Apple philosophy says that 4K 27" monitors are fundamentally broken hardware that the OS needs to fix at the cost of some display clarity. The manufacturer philosophy says that DisplayPort can't run 5K off a single cable[0] and that nobody wants letterboxing when watching a movie on their new laptop. Apple designs the monitor around what the OS and user need while display manufacturers design around whatever they can buy and repackage. Of course macOS has fuzzy fonts even at 1x, but that's not a display problem. That's a different Strongly Held Belief. Microsoft deliberately bends fonts to fit the pixel grid (they call this ClearType) while Apple uses antialiasing to remain faithful to the glyph shapes as they were originally designed. [0] Or at least this was true as of the release of the iMac 5K almost a decade ago. This is not true anymore but no manufacturer is touching 5K anyway.

politelemon 4y ago
This is typical but poor gymnastics which grants benefit of the doubt to brand loyalty. Manufacturers hold no such belief, they are beholden to standards to cater to a wide variety of configurations and setups. Implying it's not made for users is poor form, and simply false.
- jahewson 4y ago
  If this were true then companies other than Apple would offer monitors that actually do cater to non-broken configurations but they don’t. The parent post does a great job explaining the technical trade-offs and economy of scale optimisations that manufacturers have decided to make, whereas you have only an ad-hominem attack to offer.
zajio1am 4y ago
Problem is that fractional scale factors are broken, unless your GUI is completely vector-based. While OS can render texts and vector graphics on fractional scales, bitmaps has to be scaled, which makes them blurry.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Bitmap scaling doesn't become blurry if you have enough resolution (e.g. going from 2x to 1.5x is fine). Vector scaling breaks because layout calculations don't take the pixel grid into account. The most egregious example of this is CSS floats, where browsers have to do all sorts of hacks to ensure that percentages still add up to 100% after rounding. Otherwise fractional zoom factors cause layouts to have pixel gaps or overflow onto other pages. Fonts get around this with hinting but there's no way to hint a CSS layout.
trasz 4y ago
I'd attribute this to the fact that the way technology is organised follows how the groups of people who develop it are organised. The Ghost Of The New Machine thing; "if you put database folks and kernel folks into the same office, you'll end up with parts of database in the kernel".