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Comment by dgllghr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what Apple will do about this for their upcoming (?) OLED MacBook Pros

The tandem OLED screens they use on the iPad Pro stack multiple OLED layers on top of each other and reduces the brightness of the layers.

The brighter you run OLED, the more burn in you get.

The QD-OLED standard they tested in TFA is also supposed to be more burn in resistant, but they still saw burn in over time.

Tandem OLED costs more the bigger the screen and that is the reason why they’re not more prevalent in PC land.

It is also the primary reason why Apple, with its native monitors being 5K and 6K, cost more and unfortunately a nasty side effect raised its head 5K and 6K require more info running down the cable, and that is the primary reason Apple moved over to Thunderbolt 5, 5K or higher at 120hz requires thunderbolt five if you want to use a single cable.

Menubar is going to be a killer

I’ve got an Apple Watch Series 6 that has had an always on clock face for 5 years. In the flashlight mode in the lowest brightness I can see burn in, but nowhere else can I see any sign of burnin.

So oled burn in is not a totally solved issue but it’s not a big enough deal for me to care when the literal worst case scenario of an always on clock face does not cause real issues after years.

It would be amusing if they enabled autohide by default, for those models.

Not release it, as Apple only releases technology that has been perfected.

Their consumer dementia field is certainly working well, if that's what you think.

They use oled.

yeah like their VR goggles

and their butterfly keyboards

and the iPhone antenna issue

and Apple Maps (especially on launch)

and this fun artifact: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2006/08/24/hindenbook-re...

Screw us all with another fashion trend for terrible displays, just like when they switched to high-glare screens.

Glossy displays are much better for image quality in light-controlled environments than matte. I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings, maybe you just live in a sunnier climate and want to work outdoors? I would never buy hardware with a matte display over glossy, given two equivalent choices. You just lose so much clarity and pop to basically rub a layer of vaseline over your monitor, diffusing the nice image quality into something oily/grainy looking.

I'm diurnal. I have windows (not Windows®). I don't live in a basement. I don't control the lighting where I work.

> I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings...

Most folks cannot prevent every source of light from shining behind them. In my apartment, even sunlight leaking around curtains and indirectly illuminating the Landlord Standard White walls was image-damagingly bright on the handful of glossy-screened monitors I tried.

If you have total control over the lighting situation in your room, then, yeah, glossy screens can work... but most folks want to be able to use their computers and televisions in a wide variety of lighting conditions. [0]

> ...something oily/grainy looking.

I guess you've only seen bad AR coatings. The difference in image quality between the glossy screens I tried and the matte screens I have and have been continuing to use for the past great many years wasn't all that large... and the bonkers reflectivity of the glossy screens nuked what little difference there was.

[0] Most folks also don't like so much looking at their ugly mugs during dark portions of a program... glossy screens are -while not as bad as a mirror- so incredibly reflective.

I have for years wanted Apple to offer a MacBook with a matte screen. Now with a Framework I couldn't go back to the impossible glare.

And if a few years from now they come out with a better screen, you can self install it in a 15 minutes.

They do, it’s called Nano-texture.

FWIW upcoming Duo has nanotexture.

Too little, too late. With the growing enshittification of macOS and the Apple ecosystem in general, I couldn't be happier having made the move back to Linux on a Framework laptop, after almost 2 decades.

It's available and it works well. Staring at one right now. I don't like it better than glossy for my use, but if I spent a lot of time outdoors with it, I probably would.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/the-new-macbook...

When did they switch to high glare screens? I thought that was the original style for Apple.

Apple has offered matte screens for the majority of their timeline. Matte screens were available on portable computers from ~1989-2009, and as high end option from 2009-2013. The nano texture was introduced 2019 and has been available to varying degrees until present day.

So it was really only about 6 years in the last four decades that matte was not available. I always advocate for more matte options.

It was with the first generation of unibody macbooks in 2008, if I remember correctly. I have a Powerbook G4 with a nice matte screen, and I distinctly remember the first generation of non-unibody MBP also having a similar matte screen.

So it's been a while. 18 years with glossy screens.

Oh! You brought to mind my beloved 2004 17" PowerBook with the pulsing light: I loved that machine. I tried to use it recently but it's hopeless: only a couple websites come up.

Back in the PowerBook days, Apple shipped matte screens by default.

The magazine reviews made a big deal about the matte coatings of the day making the screen a little dimmer, so after years of being dinged on the reviews, Apple finally dropped them.

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