Why isn't there any HiDPI resolution on my M1 Mac?

This might just be them overtightening in response to that problem of old (whilst continuing to deny its existence, of course heh).

Edit: Plugging in an external monitor (not all of them, seems random) will cause the laptop's GPU to instantly 4x its powerdraw to about 20 watts, which then lasts for the duration of that connection.

I.e, a monitor with a resolution of 5120x2160.

Submitted title was "Apple Intentionally Disabled HiDPI on M1 Macs, No Support for non-4K Monitors". Submitters: please don't editorialize titles like that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it in a comment in the thread. Then your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: Since this has been a problem in other cases (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31126605 was bad enough to post about, and there have been others), I'm removing submission privileges from this account until we get some reason to believe that it won't keep recurring.

(I mean at a distant-enough remove, sure, everything any company does is for profit. But seeing a locked door and assuming it must be to support a ticket vendor ignores a universe of other explanations.)

The article is likely a marketing effort, the website where the article is published sells software for switching resolution. I wouldn't read too much into it.

I can imagine people being a bit irritated about this.

I don’t mind if it requires “advanced” settings modes or terminal commands or whatever, but I should be able to configure a device I own to output any combination of resolution and display scaling that it’s capable of (and is supported by the connected display), regardless of what’s plugged in or whether someone at Apple can see a good reason to want to do so.

I'm currently using 2x 27 inch 4k displays in scaled mode (the second setting from the left) on an M1 mac and it looks great. Fonts look fine to me.

It’s not 2X integer scaling but I don’t notice at all.

Could you explain? We have three different 4K 27" screens around the house and for me the five options between Larger text and More space in Display Preferences are completely fine? I pick the size I want and the fonts are completely crisp? If you want to select resolutions, you can hold the Option key and click the Scaled radio button and you can select concrete resolutions.

May experience with Linux has been the opposite. Integer scaling works well (assuming that the toolkit of an application supports it), but once you use fractional scaling (even on GNOME on Wayland), a lot of CPU cycles are burnt for rendering, and many non-GNOME applications will be rendered at a lower DPI and scaled up and everything is blurry. I had a ThinkPad with a 1080p 14" screen and an external 4k 27" screen. Both were practically unusable. With the native resolution everything is too small, with 2x scaling everything is too big, and with 1.5-1.75 scaling, many applications are blurry. I ended up using the native resolution and scaling up the font size. At least text was not too small or to big, but a lot of widgets were tiny and barely usable.

In Windows the options themselves are fine, but there are too many legacy apps that do not support scaling and just look blurry :(. And with plugging/unplugging of an external screen, Windows was often not able to put windows back in the right places.

HiDPI scaling was one of the long list of issues that made be go back to macOS after using a ThinkPad with Windows and Linux for 7 months a year ago.

This probably means it was trying to do subpixel rendering, but under incorrect assumptions about what the subpixel layout was. Problems of this type have recently become pretty pervasive.