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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Apple does that for MacBook Airs as well since their monitor resolution is not ideal for integer scaling.

Apple never supersamples by 2x. Default MacBook Air scaling was around 1.1x iirc.

It’s actually around 1.5x for the default resolution out of the box and 1.3x for “more space” setting on m1/m2 MacBook Air. 1.1x supersampling on Macs makes it worse because down sampling to pixel alignment becomes a hot mess.

Fine, you made me look it up. M1 Air defaults to 2880x1800 on a 2560x1600 display, which is a 1.125x scaling. Nowhere near the 1.5x you claim.

2560 x 1664 is the resolution of the latest M5 Air. The default UI is 1470 × 956. "More space" is 1710 × 1112.

When you set it to "more space" it becomes noticeably slower, but not blurry.

Those numbers of 1470x956 are “points” or “looks like” values, not the size of the frame buffer. The frame buffer for “looks like 1470x956” is exactly 2x that, or 2940x1912. On a 2560x1664 display, that’s a 1.148x scale factor. Again, nowhere near 2x, even on the “more space” setting.

If you’re counting by the framebuffer than the only 2x is the hidpi-forced-into-lowdown like the link suggest. The ratios I’m referring to is the UI scaling against the physical display pixel dimensions.

Apple basically settles into 220 dpi physical displays (250 moc MacBook Pro), rendering UI at a 2x scale as a default, except for MacBook Airs.

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