Q&A with the developer of BetterDummy: from macOS secrets to his motivations
theregister.com
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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.
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?
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?
If you've already moved on to 27" or higher, 4K was never enough!
There's also only a single 5k display on the market (also from LG).
It's a shame that there are so few high res displays on the market, and they are all 16:9...
So if you have a 4k TV and a 4k monitor, there’s actually quite a difference. If your monitor is bigger than 24” you’re getting way worse pixel density and visible pixels at the distance you’re sitting.
On TVs it’s typically never a problem because you’re sitting far enough away.
The closest we have now are some wide 5K's with good DPI and the Dell 8K.
What I need is sweet, sweet resolution! Those ultra-wide or high-frame rate all come at the expense of DPI which is the same with the DPI from 2K monitors...
The worst part about this is the fact that macOS does in fact support MST, but only for their 6K (and 5K on older machines, no longer requires MST since DP 1.3) display.
Please stop apologizing for Apple's customer-hostile behaviour here. A $2 trillion company should be able to make an external monitor not look like blurry trash when connected to their hardware.
The fact that it takes someone to make a third-party app to fix what Apple can't speaks volumes to how much they care about/understand their customer base. Apple should have tested M1 hardware with hot garbage external monitors, realized the customer experience sucked, and fixed it.
Apple could always choose to add some "innovation" to the external monitor market by manufacturing their own line of displays. [1] For example, they have a nice 4.5K display in the iMac, but they won't sell it as a monitor for some reason.
Instead, they offer exactly one external monitor that starts at $4999 USD.
It'd be quite nice if Apple would upend the external monitor market but usually they prefer serving their own market instead. And as an Apple user today you are quite spoiled indeed...
Applications already know how to deal with subpixel AA, and dealing with one application with poor antialiasing is still vastly preferably to dealing with one application with broken HiDPI scaling.
If monitors could just stagnate in ~2010-2015 tech for all eternity, that'd be great. It's a solved problem, let's collectively move on to problems that actually deserve the attention.
I can't go back now, once I got used to high-dpi everything else looks like garbage.
Same with 15" 4k hi quality laptop screen vs 40" 4k display.
So in the only metric that matters, hidpi appears to be irrelevant.
The only thing that I find to matter is the angular size of the display at a distance, that doesn't make your eyes strain. (as a dev)
- 400+ nits peak brightness (my room gets really bright during the day, and my current monitor at 250 nits is practically unusable near noon)
- 4k resolution at 32 inch size (so I can use it without scaling while not taking too much desk space)
- < $500 (I refuse to pay more for a 32 inch screen than a 40 inch+ screen in a TV with much better specs)
As far as I can tell, this monitor doesn't exist (suggestions welcome!). Especially problematic is that brightness requirement, every monitor with more than 300 nits brightness I've seen has costed over $1000 for some reason.
At this point I'm probably going to just end up settling for a 40-43 inch TV instead, plenty of those that meet those requirements within the $500 budget, but the last time I used a TV as a monitor, I remember being really annoyed at having to use my remote to turn on the TV after it goes to sleep (turns off?), compared to a monitor which can get woken up by inputs from the connected computer.
Are there any other folks using TVs as monitors here? Curious if people have ideas on how to get around this issue in their own setups?
YMMV, but in my experience cheapo TVs tend to not support 60Hz refresh rate. Most often it's either 24, 30 or 50, and that's absolutely a dealbreaker. It's fine for a TV, not for a computer monitor.
So if you're trying to save a buck, TV is probably not an option.
I don't think it's true anymore though as most TVs I've seen, even the cheap ones, can do 4k 60hz over HDMI no problem.
This one I've been eye'ing is $500 at amazon for the 43 inch version: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-43-Inch-Class-QLED-Built/dp/B...
According to rtings it does 4k at 60hz, 500+ nits peak brightness, and even has a 32 inch version (at a even lower $400 price)!
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/q60-q60a-qled
It's an absolute steal in terms of specs/dollar compared to pretty much every 4k monitor out there. I'm just hesitant to pull the trigger because of the manual wake up thing, which has really frustrated me in the past.
I "solved" the issue of my preferred screen size not being available by going retro. It turns out that 12+ year old formerly-expensive flatscreens are a bit rubbish with brightness and power consumption, but they are better than "modern" screens for my preferences.
The last thing I want in my monitor is any "software". It's meant to do one thing - display pixels. IoT-ization of screens will just turn them into another "smart TV" product category with unusable UX, ads, always-on connectivity and data collection, cloud profiles (see Razer mice), and 30+ second startup times.
And I really don't mind when producers gather (anonymized) telemetry data of my usage: maybe that'll get them to improve those damn products.
Realistically, why does it matter what the exact mechanism of applying calibration data is? As long as it works with the appropriate .ICM file, I'm happy. Or, (sounds crazy) just have monitors introduce a setting that treats the video input as a dumb, uncalibrated RGB stream and do the colour mapping internally in the monitor.
That would not be nice.
When you "calibrate" a monitor, you're really creating an output profile... a record of what signals create which colors. You can also calibrate a camera, and get an input profile, which is a record of which colors create what signals.
If you display a picture on-screen with a color profile, and your monitor has a color profile, the software translates the image from the image's color profile to the monitor's profile, and displays that on-screen. The problem here is that different pictures on screen will have different profiles, so you can't just load a profile into the monitor and do the conversion there.
For example, you might open a website, and see a bunch of pictures with sRGB profiles. And then you might open another website, and see pictures with Adobe RGB, which covers a wider gamut. The Adobe RGB profile pictures can be more colorful, if your monitor supports it, but both sets of pictures can be on-screen at the same time. Then there's the different ways you convert from one profile to another, depending on what you want (perceptual, relative colorimetric, absolute colorimetric).
There are absolutely zero reasons why an M1 shouldn't work with 1080p and above, except the usual Apple greed and lock-in.
If you want an 8k display at 60Hz, your only option is to use Windows.
Microsoft is also the only company that offers a high res 3:2 display (the Surface Studio at 4500x3000 pixels), a size that is more geared towards productivity rather than streaming movies.
It's weird that if you want to get nice displays, Windows is today a better option than macOS.
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.
"buys because their $300 external display isn't working"
with the fact that our external display was $1500. I'm confused now :-)
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?!
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.
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.
Here's to hoping that someday we'll get to enjoy both!
IMO, 4K60 is a reasonable choice for those that prioritise resolution over refresh rate.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-16-is-hot-noisy-wi...
1. https://www.imore.com/heres-why-you-should-probably-charge-y...
No matter. I'm going to sell it anyway. What a fan monster.
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.
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.
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.
That doesn't make sense as they completely rewrote their SMB implementation to improve it.
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...
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...
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?
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.
In fact, once you see these new 280dpi displays, even 5k@27'' barely makes the cut. I wish it were sharper.
Here's Apple's range of Retina displays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_display#Models
The DPI difference between highest (iPhone 12) and lowest (Pro Display XDR) is 2.2x. The angular resolution difference at typical viewing distance between those two screens is 1.1x. Clearly the angular resolution at typical viewing distance is a much better definition of what's good enough resolution than the DPI.
But I'm glad we got over the idea that 220dpi is a magical number. Otherwise not even the iMac or the Apple Pro XDR displays counted as HiDPI.
To me, 163ppi looks more similar to how old ~100ppi displays looked that to my 224ppi iMac.
The only external hiDPI displays that exist are the Apple Pro XDR (only works on macOS), and the Dell UP3218K (doesn't work on macOS).
Of course the iMac is hiDPI, but it's not an external display.
It's bewildering how manufacturers keep pushing for this low resolution 4k crap 10 years (!!!!) after hiDPI displays first appeared in laptops.
Reference: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=monlcd19wide&xf=12018_200
It was updated in 2019 as the 27MD5KL-B, specifically designed for Macs:
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27md5kl-b-5k-uhd-led-monit...
I saw it listed on apple.com two months ago, but it was a month+ back-ordered. I ended up buying one via eBay (for my Mac Mini M1).
EDIT: it's still available on apple.com: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMUB2LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k...
And also unfortunately, the build quality is very, very bad.
But yes, better get that one while you still can! But be warned, my friend recently got one, and had to go through about 10 retailers until he found one that could actually sell him one. Many retailers put these on their websites in the hope that LG will be able to deliver stock, but LG can't deliver stock.
Color-wise, the LG is fantastic - and I was very skeptical about getting it. The old one wasn't very good when I compared it side by side with an iMac Pro (Apple Store, Union Street, SF). I'm not sure if they changed the screen quality, but it seems on par, if not better than my old Cinema Display.
EDIT: yeah, my first purchase was via Amazon as "Used - Like New", which turned out to be a 2 year old model that couldn't talk to the Mac. I found a new one at a great price via eBay which works great, but the manual was in Cyrillic...
I think the early models had some problems. I've got the later version and it is rock solid.
5k 27" is HiDPI, because it 2x the old 1440 screens.
We have a definition, it's ppi, and you need at least 220ppi.
> Apple uses 1440p/1600p on laptop screens.
No, it doesn't.
The current 14'' screen is 3024x1964 and the current 16 inch is 3456x2234 (both 254ppi).
The previous generation used about 220ppi displays.
Retina display: 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560-by-1600 native resolution
If 1600p on 13" is not Retina you need to argue this with Apple instead.
It's 226ppi display. Why would it not be a retina display?
1920x1080: 1080p
2560x1440: 1440p
2560x1600: ...
EDIT: if you're going to edit your comment once called out on talking nonsense, at least have the decency to note it.
High end for 60Hz these days is OLED, IPS is the de-facto standard, and TN or VA aren’t worth buying.
I’m personally running 3 24” external monitors, and I’m fairly sure that I’d have a viewing angle issue had my panels been TN.
I bought 3 4K 27” LG ups ones, one the corners blew out (massive bleed til you can’t see the pixels for the white shining through), one is going thr same way and only the newest shows no sign of it (yet).
Going Samsung next time since LG make panels for everyone and I simply don’t trust them now.
27 inch 1440p at 100% scaling in Windows or MacOS is what most would be consider appropriate sizing for UI elements and text by default, so in order to achieve high dpi you need a 5k monitor, like the LG UltraFine or the 27 inch iMac.
Does nobody at Apple use external monitors??
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.
They literally claimed to be better than that $30k monitor. It is totally fair to compare it and prove that Apple was wrong.
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...
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.
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.