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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Apple gives no shit about being pixel-perfect lately. Try using modern macOS on a non-retina display and your eyes will bleed because every single icon is drawn as if there's no pixel grid whatsoever. Everything is a blurry mess. Steve Jobs would've definitely fired someone over this, yet with Tim Cook it stays unfixed for more than 2 years — I'd guess because pixel-perfect icons don't affect the bottom line.

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On some MacBooks, the default screen resolution is not a perfect 2x, but something like 1.75x. This means macOS is drawing its framebuffer in 2x, then scaling it down to 1.75x to fit the actual screen resolution which blurs things.

The new MacBook Pro for example uses perfect 2x scaling, but the MacBook Air has a smaller resolution screen and is not 2x.

It really is appalling. It’s not just icons; if you switch Finder to gallery view and look at some photos, the previews aren’t scaled properly. The only way I can describe it is that it looks like it was downsampled without any blending—as if they just picked every fourth pixel or something. Really jaggedy.

I fully appreciate that it’s never gonna look anywhere near as good as a display with 4x as many pixels, but it’s really, really bad. The same monitor on a Windows machine looks great!

Did some rearranging of my desks to seperate my work and play spaces, so my work from home desk now has a 1080p 21" monitor. It's amazing how not built for that modern macOS is. Even font rendering is a disaster again.

    defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

This should help with the font rendering.

Na, Steve would probably say “using a crappy external monitor with low res will get you crappy results”

It was never about supporting your own hardware, it was - give us your wallet and we will make it all work.

To be fair, if you are trying it on a non-retina display, you’re out of spec or running hackintosh. Aren’t all mac’s retina?

edit I totally forgot about plug-in external displays… in which case, ya need 1440p or better.

Apple still sells Macs that don't come with a screen. If someone buys a Mac Mini, chances are high that they will plug into it the monitor they already own, which most probably won't be retina.

I do use a 1440p monitor. The blurriness is still very much noticeable. It was much better on Mojave when all icons were drawn to the pixel grid.

And yes I'd buy a 5K monitor, which is the retina equivalent of 1440p, but these things aren't exactly easy to come by. Besides the blurriness is still visible even on retina displays, it's just not as pronounced.

> in which case, ya need 1440p or better

You can’t really get 1440p monitors any smaller than 27” though. And I have a (really quite good) 27” 1440p monitor and it looks like dog shit on macOS. Same monitor under Windows looks great. Sure it doesn’t hold a candle to my MacBook’s own 220ppi screen but it handily outclasses whatever the hell macOS is doing at 1x scaling

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