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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> I totally don't get your display argument - how can a display with higher resolution and which can be brighter in any way be a disadvantage?

I'd rather not sideline this with a discussion about resolution and brightness, because frankly, it's one of those subjective, "try it yourself and see what works best for you" sort of things. In short, I view high brightness as a drawback, not a feature, and the resolution + font size is more important on OS X, where I have a much harder time getting everything to a reasonable size for me in concert.

I'm willing to bet none of that sounds familiar - as I said, it's one of those things where, if you have to ask, it's not an issue for you. All I can recommend in your case is that, if you're considering an XPS13, take look at one of the XPS13 models and seeing if that display works for you or not.

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You can always increase the font size or lower the brightness...

You can't do the opposite if the display does not support it.

> You can always increase the font size

As I said, that doesn't solve the problem.

> You can't do the opposite if the display does not support it.

Sure, but this display works for me, and there are plenty of things I can do on Linux which I can't on OS X (and which I care about much more).

If my problems aren't issues for you (which they're not) and you really care about display/rendering/etc., then yes, you probably want a Mac and this computer probably isn't for you. I like it because I've never been happy with a Macbook Air, and this is a Linux Ultrabook that "just works".

You seem to assume that you must use OSX on a MacBook. Actually, because that was the topic here, I was assuming that you would also use Linux there - that would also be a better comparison. There are many happy Linux users which use MacBooks.

Anyway, on OSX, you can also do a lot but you are right, there is no official way to change the global font size (afaik) (and you are also right that that wasn't really an issue for me so far). Anyway, most applications have their own settings. (Usually, I even go smaller than the default sizes to have more content on my screen.)

> I was assuming that you would also use Linux there - that would also be a better comparison.

Not really - I'm comparing what works out of the box on both computers with official support and zero tweaking whatsoever.

Even without the XPS13, I'd just as soon get another computer and install Linux on it myself. That way I can choose my own hardware, and I don't have to deal with the annoying Apple keyboards, some of the known Linux issues specific to Apple hardware, and (most importantly), the incredibly irritating delay on the Caps_lock key hardcoded into the firmware (which I believe remains an issue even when running Linux).

Mac min brightness is too bright in a dark room.

Mac UI chrome does not scale neatly to large font sizes.

Btw, I'm with you. I turn down the brightness of my monitors and have gray-on-black in my terminal windows.

For a while, I even went hardcore and used color-blind color mappings hotkeys via compiz to cut out the white glare backgrounds of web pages.

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