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Comment by refrigerator | Hacker News Reader

Curious about your 'low res screen' comment - 1080p on a 13.3" screen seems plenty to me!

I agree. Not quite "retina" but almost too high DPI for unscaled Windows.

Windows scaling has gotten good enough where it'd be a deal-breaker for me to purchase a notebook without a "retina" screen. Especially when you're talking about a notebook pushing $1000.

I think that depends very much on the suite of apps you use. There's plenty of apps where the scaling is rather broken and seriously takes away from the experience.

It is passable for a phone, but if you do something more productive than browsing the web or watching youtube, 1080p is definitely not an economical use of the space. QHD+ is absolute minimum in terms of how much information you can display.

I owned one of the 2014 or 2015 Macbook Pro 13" thingies. Its effective resolution was 720p. That information density is so low that I couldn't use it. Using the full resolution, things were too small. Anything in between was unusable since the GPU couldn't render the OS animations smoothly.

Is your eyesight just so good that you can use the non-scaled versions?

There's a wide range of scaled resolutions with the retina MBPs. I usually go somewhere in the middle to high resolution space. My brain can't handle the jaggies I see when I use my MacBook Air 13" now.

About two years ago or so, when I bought a 13" MBP, they had an intermediate resolution setting. But the OS started to lag und stutter when I switched between virtual desktops (I think it's called workspace). I believe this is because they render at double the effective resolution and then scale down. Therefore, the intermediate settings are the most taxing for the GPU.

I couldn't find a way to disable the animations and since I use virtual desktops a lot and the usual effective 720p resolution is almost comically large, it all added up to be a dealbreaker for me and I returned it.

1080p on a 13.3 inch supports as much text as I can reasonably read on that size. Any higher resolution would just draw more battery and result in me having to scale up to compensate. And I have "perfect" vision.

If I'm doing something "more productive"/work I just connect more monitors. Resolution is only relevant up to a point, then screen size takes over.

I'm honestly unsure if I can even spot the difference between 1080p and 1440p on a 5.5" phone in a blind test (ironic phrasing). Have you tried?

I would love to have higher resolution on screens 24" and up without paying out the nose for 4k (1440p is reasonable in pricing), but the escalating resolutions in phones in recent years was just ridiculous, and fortunately it seems to have stopped now, and OP3 at least stopped at 1080p and focused on other hardware.

Spotting the difference between 1080 and 1440 on a phablet is one thing, but if you can't see a world of difference between 1080 and 1600 on a 13 at a typical laptop distance your vision is not perfect.

I didn't say I can't see the difference, I said I can't use the difference.

I used to think it wasn't that big of a deal until I started a new project where they require me to use their dell laptop with a 1080p 13" screen. When I went back to my 15" retina the difference is just astounding and my eyes are not what they once were. The font smoothing on a higher-density display really make it like reading a (backlit) book.

Sure, that I can actually agree with. But I might argue that it actually plays to my point. Getting to use that smoothing means that you actually upscale the text from "traditional" pixel size, meaning you don't actually fit anything more on the screen, but the content you do fit just looks better. The parent I responded to argued that there was too little real estate, which I disagreed with.

Small fonts are smoothed as well

QHD+ (3200x1800) is, IMHO, absolute overkill on 13" screen and have only one purpose - to show "mine is better than yours" numbers in the spec list.

As a comparison, MacBook Pro, the laptop that invented "retina" laptop display, have 2560x1600 on 13". I dare you to spot the difference between 13" MacBook Pro and any current Windows laptop with crazy high resolutions when the fonts are the same size.

BTW, 15" MacBook Pro have 2880x1800 (still below QHD+), and 12" Macbook have "strange" resolution of 2304x1400 - Apple cares about the battery life and packs reasonable number of pixels on the screen. Other manufacturers probably don't have so much weight and confidence in their products, and packs any available high-res display into laptops. But let's don't confuse bad logistic and sloppy manufacturing with economical use of display and battery.

I think it is down to ones ability to see. My travel-work laptop has QHD+ screen and I can easily see pixels from normal working distance. 1080p screen could definitely give me "90s experience"

So you had a laptop in 90s with 1080p? Tell us more please!

I think you take things too literally. But in the 90s I had a computer connected to analogue TV which was pretty blurry, that means you couldn't see pixels at all ;)

>> As a comparison, MacBook Pro, the laptop that invented "retina" laptop display, have 2560x1600 on 13"

It's an effective 1280x800 from the factory, and elements on screen are too big to be effective. Adjusting the slider over to an approximated 1440x900 is a must.

2880x1800 (what the 15" comes with) would be perfect for the 13" model, which would give a higher effective resolution with not artifacts.

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