Alternate headline choice: Man with ability to research decides not to and is disappointed in purchase but offered full refund
There was no way of knowing exactly which display was used without access to a MacBook Pro because that's not information made public by Apple, either. It's an awfully roundabout way of finding out how many colors can be displayed.
In hindsight it's easy to say he could have done the research ahead of time, but think about this: 1) It's called a MacBook Pro and is marketed at more demanding users, i.e. professionals, 2) Apple advertises it as being able to display millions of colors despite the fact that it really only displays 262,144. Under those circumstances, it's probably easy to take a look at the specs on the Apple site and feel confident that it's the right product.
There's still the matter of Apple refusing to disclose which of its products do, in fact, display millions of colors as advertised. At least they offered him a refund in the end, but in my opinion the whole thing sucks. I don't have a problem paying more and getting my money's worth, but they're clearly skimping on parts for products directly targeting the most demanding users.
Which "professionals"? 8bit color is important to pretty much one professional group: graphic artists/designers (maybe two, if you include people doing video work). For the vast majority of people - "professional" or otherwise - 6bit vs. 8bit color doesn't matter. It looks good, it's fast, it runs what they want. Those are the things that matter.
As a developer, I consider myself a "professional", and my life is fine with 6bit color. My roommate is a screenwriting "professional" and they're fine with 6bit color. Presumably an 8bit color display would cost more, and hence would reduce the number of people who could afford the machine, at the expense of pleasing one small market segment.
Bottom line is that if a feature (any feature) was important enough for me that it would make or break my decision to buy the underlying system, I'd explicitly confirm its existence (in a way more rigorous than "millions and millions", which sounds like marketing-speak), and I'd get reviews from my peers who would have the same interests. In this case, the author did neither.
They would ask "if I looked at my monitor, could it show me 'millions of colors'?" to which the one-word answer is "yes". If you had some time, you could expand it to be "yes, but the majority of those are done by this process called dithering, which is when..." and the person you're talking to has lost interest and/or gotten confused. To them, color is color, and they don't care about dithering since it's not visible to them.
This is who marketing is designed for. When most people here see an ad for a system, they immediately skip all the marketing bits and go to the stats, and from that get a good mental idea about the performance of the system, where the bottlenecks will be, etc. When "average" people see an ad for a system they look at the ad copy that says "will launch Word in half the time", decide that that's what they need, and buy the thing.
Ad copy caters to, and explains in context for, the lowest common denominator. If you're not that, then you should be looking elsewhere (at the fine print, the stats, the asterisk at the bottom of the page, etc.) to draw your own conclusions.
(This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)
When you use dithering/pixel tricks to fake color depth, everything turns slightly fuzzy and washed out. Even black is affected. It really begins to affect the way things look and feel on the screen.
I do agree with the sentiment that it is disingenuous of Apple (and almost everyone else in the industry) not to list the bit depth of their displays, though.
A 6-bit display is capable of displaying more than 6 bits of color information, using a technique named temporal dithering. For an example, open this image on a 6-bit display: < http://imgur.com/BeVicl.png >. If the display could only display 262k colors, the squares would look identical.
(Well, assuming one is comparing on a true 8 bit screen.)
A class action law suit about this issue was filed last year, it's not exactly breaking news.
This is not clear at all. Every manufacturer uses 6-bit displays, even in most if not all high-end models. This has been true for years. They choose to do so because such displays have desirable properties other than color, such as price and lower response times.
Sure, he's asking for a pony in some ways, but they're making pro machines with displays that don't do what they say or anything "pro" for that matter.
Actually, as he explained in the article, he made the decision based on specs, and weight.
The author makes a point that it's hard to believe an extremely well-regarded company like Apple would fail to disclose the true color depth of their panels or that the millions of colors are generated by dithering rather than the native capability of the monitor. I do agree though that his article was rather long for the point he made. There was some entertainment value in the length but it was not value a typical HN reader would seek
I say write the letter and address it to Steve Jobs. See what happens. It's worth a shot.