It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.
This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.
Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.
I haven't seen a single display that ever overcame that properly for long term work. Sure, phones use it but they increased luminosity to absurd level to be readable, not a solution I prefer for daily long work.
I admit there are corner cases of pro graphics where it made sense (with corresponding changes to environment) but I am not discussing this here.
You know what's glossy? Movie posters and postcards.
I still say for comfortable all day viewing and productivity, there is no comparison. Glossy does have more pop on a phone or watching movies in the dark, but I'd go blind doing that all day every day..
I guess Apple cheaped out on their glossy displays, because I definitely didn't care for mine in full daylight
When your screen can do 1,600 nits, daylight isn't as much of a problem
To get to actual 1600 nits you need to use scripts.
https://github.com/SerjoschDuering/macbook_1600nits
Not sure the impacts to display health or battery running the screen full bore like this.
I'd much rather do that than to have a granier screen with worse viewing angles all the time I'm not in direct sunlight, so next time around I'll be back on glossy.
The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.
There's a graininess to the screen that makes it feel a little worse at all times, meanwhile I never had a problem in daylight just cranking brightness into the XDR range using Lunar.
It's especially noticeable on light UIs, where empty space gets an RGB "sparkle" to it. I noticed the same thing when picking out my XDR years ago, so it seems like they never figured out how to solve it.
I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.
But a fraction of that distance to my monitor makes even 4K barely good enough. I’d need a much smaller 4K monitor to not notice pixels.
At least to me, with corrected vision, a high quality 1080p video looks better than streaming quality 4k at the same distance.
Used to have a 27" 2560x1440 monitor at home. Got a 4K 27" at work, and when I got home, the difference was big enough that I (eventually) decided to upgrade the home monitor.
Glasses make a huge difference when watching TV, and are the dividing line between being able to tell the difference between 4K and 1080p and not being able to discern any.
My eyesight isn’t perfect, either.
I also use 60Hz screens just fine, saying that getting used to 120Hz ruins slower displays is being dramatic. You can readjust to 60Hz again within 5 minutes. But I can still instantly tell which is higher refresh rate, at least up to 360Hz.
Most people who’ve used both 60 and 120 could tell, definitely if a game is running. Unless you’re asking me to distinguish between like 110 and 120, but that’s like asking someone to distinguish between roughly 30 and 32.
North of 120 it gets trickier to notice no matter what IMO.
I can live with 60 but 85+ is where I’m happy.
On a perfect display you should see just a faint grey circle.
Another test is moving cursor fast across the white page and tracking it with eyes. On a perfect display it should be perfectly crisp, on my display it blurs and moves in steps.
So basically on a perfect display you can track fast moving things, and when not tracking, they are blurred. On a bad display, things blur when tracking them, and you see several instances otherwise. For example, if you scroll a page with a black box up-down, on a bad display you would see several faint boxes overlayed, and on a perfect display one box with blurred edges.
The jump forward doesn't even necessarily feel that huge but the step backward is (annoyingly) noticeable.
Especially wellness.
However, I'm typing this on my Dell monitor which only does 60 Hz. It honestly doesn't bother me at all. Sure, when I scroll long pages I see the difference: the text isn't legible. But, in practice, I never read moving text.
However, one thing on which I can't go back is resolution. A 32" 4k screen is the minimum for me. I was thinking about getting a wider screen, but they usually have less vertical resolution than my current one. A 14" MBP is much more comfortable when looking at text all day then my 14" HP with FHD screen. And it's not just because the colors and contrast are better, it's because the text is sharper.
They were absolutely noticable. Contrast was crap. I immediately went with glossy with my next MBP around that same period.
OLED glossy on the iPad Pro is even better.
This is nearly my preferred setup, only I have wall lights on the wall behind the monitors so it's not truly a dark room (which is horrible for your eyes). No over head lights allowed on while I'm at the keyboard.
I am with you in preferring matte. For me, mostly because of reflections on glossy screens.
While it serves a useful purpose by diffusing unavoidable point light sources in uncontrolled environments, it's honestly not much of an improvement over its glossy contemporaries in sunlight and other brightly-lit environments, as diffusing already diffuse reflections has little effect.
What I've found, is that inside, the HP is much better at handling reflections. However, outside, the screen gets washed out and is next to unusable. Whereas on the MBP, I can usually find an angle where reflections don't bother me and I can spend hours using it.
Not my experience in lit environments. Looking at a mirror-like surface trying to distinguish content from reflections is exhausting.
Unless I blast my eyes at full brightness which is more exhausting.
But if there’s a window or something bright behind you, the specular reflection from the glossy and generally not anti reflective coated screen can be so bright and so full of high frequency details that it almost completely obscures the image.
And since I might be trying to work involving text in a cafe as opposed to doing detailed artistic work in a studio, I would much prefer the matte surface.
You guys need to stop reading apple advertisement material and take it for gospel just because it has some fancy scientific words in it.
I always thought matte photos were more readable, but glossy used to be more wow and have “deeper blacks”.
It is probably a pretty good screen, though.
I don’t really like Apple overall. But, to some extent, it’s like… well, maybe that’s a good way of selling incremental engineering improvements.
It's more on-brand for an Apple apologist to grope around the annals of history looking for some circuitous justification that makes other people look silly when no such example exists.
I don't recall Apple ever "insisting" anything about glossy vs. matte. They simply eliminated the matte option without comment, and finally brought it back many years later.
If you have a reference to a public statement from Apple defending the elimination of the matte option, I'd like to see it.
To be clear, I've been complaining about glossy Macs ever since matte was eliminated, and I too purchased an M4 MacBook Pro soon after it was available.
Wasn’t the matte option that disappeared just then removing the glass in front of the screen? I seem to remember that (my MBP from that time was glossy).
The nano textured coating they are using now is quite complex and I am not quite sure it was applicable at such scales cheaply enough back in 2015.
A glossy option was introduced in 2006, but the MacBook Pro was still matte by default.
In 2008, the MacBook Pro case was redesigned, and then the display situation changed significantly.
> “…the MacBook provides incredibly crisp images with richer colors, deeper blacks and significantly greater contrast…”
This is positioning for glossy being superior.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2006/05/16Apple-Unveils-New-M...
The other quote is just a list of ways in which the screen is better.
It is YOU that is conflating these and saying that this list of improvements is down to glossiness, not Apple.
A sentence in a PR that highlights an indisputable advantage of a glossy display does not position glossy as being superior overall but merely superior in the respects mentioned, which is not controversial.
Moreover, Apple continued to offer a matte display in the MacBook Pro for years after that PR, so why would they sell an "inferior" option?
Glossy was an available option, but not the product line wide choice.
The top of the line Late 2008 MacBook Pro (not Unibody) included: > An antiglare CCFL-backlit 17" widescreen 1680x1050 active-matrix display (a glossy display was offered via build-to-order at no extra cost, and a higher resolution LED-backlit 1920x1200 display also was offered for an extra US$100).
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...
Your citation is doubly irrelevant because the primary benefit of the glossy upgrade in the year or so it was an upgrade (glossy has been standard for 18 years) was a wider color gamut and higher resolution, not the glossiness of the screen itself.