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Comment by kps | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

FWIW upcoming Duo has nanotexture.

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.

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.

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.

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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