"Listen guys the code for this is a mess. Can you just buy the new Macbook?"
(love my latest gen Macbook Pro, but this is the classic problem with Apple's approach to product design)
(love my latest gen Macbook Pro, but this is the classic problem with Apple's approach to product design)
More like:
"Listen guys, the code for this is a mess AND slows your graphics down even when it's not needed. We already have had Retina displays for 6+ years already, and Hi-Dpi displays are the norm these days for third party too, so there's no reason for everybody to suffer from old tech, like there was no reason for everybody to have a floppy disk or CD-ROM on their laptop just because 5% had a real use for it. Part of the way it is with Apple, and has always been is that we move fast, and cut things off first. Until now, this exact tactic got us from near bankruptcy to being the #1 company on the planet. So, if you don't like it, don't let he door hit you on your way out".
Are they? Nearly every monitor in my company's mainly mac based office is a 1080p dell. All the monitors I personally own are 1x.
I would even go so far as to say that the majority of people who want to buy a monitor for doing text based things (ie business) will buy a bog standard monitor.
If you're on a MacOS platform, with the current price of HiDPI IPS displays, the time is right to grab just about anything. If you're on Windows or Linux, it's still a great time so as long as you're keeping all monitors the same DPI and probably integer scale.
Well, the vast majority of the people consider 60hz totally acceptable for work - and work fine with it.
For the huge majority of the people refresh ration > 60hz isn't even a concern.
Better resolution on the other hand is a marked improvement (either as more screen real estate or as finer detail retina style).
But isn't that more for quick moving stuff, like games or (in the iPhone) quicker visual response to pen input and such?
For regular computing (reading webpages, editing stuff, programming, watching movies) I don't see much of a difference.
Heck, movies are 24p and we're fine with it.
Check out iPad Pro devices with 120 Hz display. It makes a big difference in readability of scrolling text (try to read a web page while it's scrolling), responsiveness and smoothness of motion.
The ones that do already have "Hi-DPI terminal windows and really sharp text" as an almost-mandatory requirement.
Think about it. Sub-pixel text rendering (and AFAIK it's just text, not images w/ subpixel positioning? although that's an incredibly interesting idea for a hack!). Maybe subpixel vectors/lines?
Either you care about high-quality lines or you don't... what Apple's basically doing here is moving the cost to the hardware instead of the software, and the win is simplified, faster, less-energy-using device.
I'm not personally agreeing with Apple's decision, I'm responding to your disbelief that "hi-dpi is the norm". It's the norm for anyone who primarily uses an iPhone. It's the norm for anyone using modern MacBooks (don't make me source my dates on retina displays). It's the norm for "executive" users (ie: software developers, graphics users, finance, book editors, etc.).
If you're happy w/ a bog-standard 1080p output device, then obviously you're not "in search of" the best quality text you can get.
However, thinking it through, I would _really_ like then a "subpixel mode" for either the OS as a whole (kindof like an FSAA?), or especially certain windows. Maybe there's a way to do that as a hack?
True, but not being in search of the best quality doesn't mean that any quality will do.
I've been happy with text rendering on my bog-standard monitor so far. I'm not sure I will still be happy after this degradation.
But as it seems my current Mac Mini is the last of its kind anyway and I'm going to have to move on from Apple.
That's Apple's market, not people holding on to 10 year computers. Not even those that still buy the MBA.
They are not. But I guess the point of the parent poster is that Apple require its customers to spend on latest items instead of supporting old tech.
Basically, it is saying: If you can't afford this, don't buy it. It is fair given that Apple products are already marked up in price.
Historically 16:10 monitors have had the same width as 16:9 ones (e.g. 1920×1200 vs 1920×1080) so there's no difference as far as having things side by side.
Regardless of that, if all you're doing is General Business™ then surely all you need to do is grab an all-in-one box, shove as much 3rd party ram in it as will fit & then nab a couple of monitors and an unbranded mechanical keyboard off amazon.
I did a lot of work on a £700(~$900) Optiplex with 16gb of ram and that was more than capable of running ubuntu on 3 monitors while being small enough to fit into a handbag
So just let me turn it off. Or turn it off automatically when I'm scaling. Or leave it as it is because no one's ever cared about it. Removing it is the worst option of all.
> We already have had Retina displays for 6+ years already
External displays are the thing here.
I really hope the market punishes you for this sentiment.
And P.S. Apple is strong because of the iPod and iPhone - macOS is a tiny part of their business and Apple is strong in spite of their shitting on Mac customers, not because of it.
Seems more likely that Apple will simply discontinue the Air and that the MacBook represents their new vision of what laptops ought to be like.
Further, if your prediction is correct, why wouldn't Apple already have canceled the Air? what you describe is already on the market: the escape-less MacBook.
I don't feel as skeptical or negative about Apple's plans for new laptops. We shall see, soon!
When the Air was released, it had too many limitations, and too high a cost, to take over the macbook's role. Its primary market was people who really valued the mobility over all else. But as they iterated it closed the gap, until it overtook the macbook, and the macbook offer shrivelled up and died.
If you swap 'macbook' and 'Air' in that narrative, you see history repeating - today we're at the first step of that. "The new macbook" is too limited and too expensive to take the Air's place, but give them a few iterations, and I suspect the Air will become unnecessary in the line-up.
Pretty sure this is what Alan Kay means when he says that people who are serious about software will make their own hardware.
A 1x monitor will be a cheap second monitor or something attached to a Mac Mini (please keep it alive Apple) or Mac Pro (one day it will come). From Apple's point of view I imagine all of these are just super small niches.
The software folks have a good reason to remove subpixel AA; it's a hack to get better horizontal spatial resolution out of cheap monitors. The users have no reason, however, to buy better, now reasonably-priced, displays that would make subpixel AA unnecessary.
By removing subpixel AA at a time when HiDPI monitors are cheap, Apple is probably doing us a service. In a few years, hopefully everyone will be on a DPI that can render nice text. You may think it's unnecessary, but consider complex glyphs like Hanzi and Kanji, which really don't get enough mileage out of subpixel AA really.
I know it's pretty irritating to suggest that forcing users to buy new hardware is doing them "a service." But really, I see no conflict of interest here. Apple themselves probably hasn't shipped a 96 DPI display in half a decade, and they don't even sell their own external displays, so they don't stand to gain that much here other than software performance.
My 1x monitor can render text just fine using sub-pixel AA. It's a proven technique that has been around for ages and the text looks great on it.
> consider complex glyphs like Hanzi and Kanji, which really don't get enough mileage out of subpixel AA really.
If I start to become a heavy user of Hanzi and Kanji then I will consider purchasing a monitor that displays it better, but currently not an issue.
> Apple is probably doing us a service.
Requiring me to spend money on new hardware in order to avoid a regression in my experience is somehow doing me a favour? Really?
> so they don't stand to gain that much here other than software performance.
I don't understand the performance argument people keep bringing up. Subpixel AA has been around for ages and worked fine on much older hardware. Why is it suddenly a bottleneck that needs to be removed when my decade old hardware can still do it?
No, of course not. If you phrase it like that, that is, ignore the point of removing it entirely and all of the benefits that come with it, of course it's not beneficial.
However, 96 DPI was never ideal. HiDPI won't just avoid a regression, it'll improve your experience, period. And with this new software change, you'll get a performance improvement, from better caching and easier GPU acceleration, and software engineers can delete thousands of lines of potentially buggy code made to work around the interaction of subpixel rendering with other graphics code.
Like, subpixel rendering is easy to understand in theory and that might delude one into thinking that it's just a minor annoyance, but it's an annoyance that permeates the stack. You have to special case the entire stack wherever text is concerned. Effectively, the text is being rendered at 3x the horizontal resolution of everything else. This brings in complication across the board. An example is that you pretty much have to do the alpha blending in software, and when you do it requires knowledge of the final composition. Doing alpha blending in software sounds easy... But it's only easy if you do it wrong. Dealing with gamma for example. Which makes life worse because you already have to do this for the other part of your graphics library, probably with a case for both GPU acceleration and software.
Basically, you'd have to render the whole screen at 3x horizontal resolution to remove the need for all of these compositing hacks. Nobody does this because subpixel AA was a hack from the get go.
In an era where battery life and TDP are actually important, finite resources, we want to remove these hacks.
P.S.: if you've never tried rendering large amounts of text on screen before, I highly recommend you try writing a piece of software that needs to do this. A few years ago I struggled to get 60fps rendering text for an IRC client, and of course caching the glyphs was horrendously complex thanks to subpixel AA. It would've been easy if I could've just used GPU compositing like all other graphics, but instead I resorted to hacks everywhere. Maybe today's computers don't need the hacks, but it's worth noting that yes, rendering fonts is resource intensive - you're just living on top of decades of optimizations and hacks to make it look like it's easy.
But that's what it is, that's not just clever phrasing on my part.
> HiDPI won't just avoid a regression, it'll improve your experience, period.
I get that, but if I wanted to spend money on that improvement I would do that. The point is my choice is no longer between maintaining my current standard or upgrading, its between regressing my current standard or upgrading.
Do you have to upgrade the OS? Nope. It's a choice and a tradeoff.
Of course HiDPI is a regression in some ways. You can get far better non-retina monitors (low latency, higher refresh rate, wider range of aspect ratios) at any price point.
Please point to me a reasonably-priced HiDPI/Retina Ultrawide (at least 34" and 3440x1440 reso) monitor. I couldn't find one.
> Of course, I dont have answers
The questions were related to backing up what you claimed. You obviously could not do this.
Given how shoddy Win10's support for HiDPI is across applications at the moment (currently I have a choice between running my 4k laptop at full resolution and having a correctly-sized UI in all the applications I use), I seriously hope they don't do that.
Elementary level of product owner analysis I must say. Proactively constraint your product into a niche category.. tsk, tsk.
Yeah, it hasn't been working for Apple this past 2 decades. They're only near the $1 trillion mark, could have been way better...
Ok. But so what? As a customer that's not my problem, and Apple has a HUGE war chest to pay developers to maintain the mess. I have nothing but 1x displays externally and this makes Mojave a non-starter.
It is. Customers pay for code debt too -- with bugs, slow performance, and slower moving features.
From the OP it sounds more like its a pain to implement due to the number and design of abstraction layers in the modern macOS graphics stack.