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How did none of the Apple devs notice this? 4k 32" inch is the industry standard for HiDPI monitors.
by whatever1 7mo ago
How did none of the Apple devs notice this? 4k 32" inch is the industry standard for HiDPI monitors.
- MBCook 7mo agoApple doesn’t make an 4k external monitor. They’re likely all on Studio Displays.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo agoAnd prior to Apple’s re-entry into the display market, everybody internally was likely on 2x HiDPI LG UltraFine displays or integrated displays on iMacs and MacBooks. Fractional scaling (and lately, even 1x scaling “normal”) displays really are not much of a consideration for them, even if they’re popular. 2x+ integer scaling HiDPI is the main target.
- robertoandred 7mo agoDon’t think I’d call 4K at 32” high dpi.
- whatever1 7mo agoI agree with you. It's my IT who disagrees. But to be fair, until last year there were no retina monitors in the market except the Apple ones. In 2025, the tides turned, there are now way more options both for 5k and 6k retina displays.
- Gigachad 7mo agoTbh I'm not even sure what the issue is here. I have a personal M1 macbook and a work M4 and a 4k display. I don't see any issues or differences between them on my display. The M4 seems to be outputting a 4k image just fine. The article could just be AI slop since it just contains hyper in depth debugging without articulating what the problem is.
- whatever1 7mo agoIn layman terms, for some UI scaling options, text is rendered blurry by M4/M5 Macs.
- Gigachad 7mo agoRight, I just went though all of the scale options on my M4 with 4k monitor and none of them rendered blurry. Might be a very situational bug. Doesn't seem as widespread as the title makes out to be.
- wlonkly 7mo agoThe author is trying to run 2160p@2x and downsample to 4k, not 1080p@2x. It took me another comment here to understand this as well!
- jiveturkey 7mo agoNot in the Apple world, and this article is centered on Apple. https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ - 24" you need 4k - 27" you need 5K. - 32" you need 6k. Windows subpixel aliasing (Clear Type) manages a lot better with lower pixel density. Since Windows still has a commanding market share in enterprise, you might be right about the industry standard for HiDPI but for Apple-specific usage, not really.
- NBJack 7mo agoThis still baffles me. Never mind Windows; I can get sub-pixel font rendering with the ability to fine-tune it on virtually any major Linux distro since around 2010. Meanwhile, Apple had this but dropped it in 2018, allegedly under the assumption of "hiDPI everywhere" Retina or Retina-like displays. Which would be great...except "everywhere" turned out to be "very specific monitors support specific resolutions".
- smcleod 7mo agoTotally agree with those resolution suggestions. Personally I have a 32" 4k, I wanted a 5k or 6k back then (just too expensive) - but now I wish I had just got a 27" which is better suited to 4k - regardless it was a LOT better on the M2 Max with HiDPI working.
- brigade 7mo agoOP dances around the key context that this isn’t hidpi, but rather a 3rd party hack that uses hidpi rendering to supersample their “native” 4k resolution by 2x, since the end result looks more pleasing to them than the native 4k render.
- whatever1 7mo agoApple does that for MacBook Airs as well since their monitor resolution is not ideal for integer scaling.
- brigade 7mo agoApple never supersamples by 2x. Default MacBook Air scaling was around 1.1x iirc.
- raihansaputra 7mo agoIt’s actually around 1.5x for the default resolution out of the box and 1.3x for “more space” setting on m1/m2 MacBook Air. 1.1x supersampling on Macs makes it worse because down sampling to pixel alignment becomes a hot mess.
- brigade 7mo agoFine, you made me look it up. M1 Air defaults to 2880x1800 on a 2560x1600 display, which is a 1.125x scaling. Nowhere near the 1.5x you claim.
- ErneX 7mo agoI don’t think 4K at 32 inch can be considered high dpi. Not even at 27 inch. 5K at 27 inch or 6K at 32 inch would though, specially on a Mac.
- layer8 7mo agoAnything where 100% scaling isn’t usable is considered HiDPI.