[architect64]

One issue to watch out for: Sub-4K res monitors look surprisingly bad on newer versions of macOS with Apple Silicon Macs. And no, it's not simply a matter of non-Retina obviously not looking as nice as Retina monitors - something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux. This is partly caused by a lack of subpixel rendering for text on macOS, but it doesn't affect just text, with app icon graphics and such seemingly optimized for High-DPI resolutions only and thus looking awful too. You commonly see people using 3rd party apps such as BetterDisplay to partially work around this problem by tricking the system to treat 1440p displays as 5K displays and then downscale, but it doesn't solve this completely. So yes, the price for the machine is fantastic, but you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well.

[mr_toad]

> you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well

Best investment you’ll ever make. They’re not all that expensive. Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions.

I feel it’s a travesty that workplaces spend thousands on fancy desks and chairs and cheap out on bargain basement monitors.

[mikae1]

> Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions.

That's what they said. I've been using Retina/HiDPI displays at work for close to a decade now. Still can't say I prefer one over the other. I have no problem seeing pixels, especially now that I've switched to Linux (KDE Plasma) at home. In fact I kind of like being able to catch a glimpse of the building blocks of the virtual world.

What actually does matter (for me) is uniformity and color accuracy. And you can't have that for cheap, especially not in 4K.

[anemoknee]

Is this with newer Apple Silicon Macs? My 2020 M1 Mac Mini looks unremarkably normal on my 1440p display. I'm also going between that and my 14" M1 Pro Macbook Pro, which of course looks beautiful but doesn't really make the 1440p on the Mini 'bad'.

Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.

[gymbeaux]

In my experience, you can’t do any sort of scaling with sub-4K displays. This is “since M1”. Intel Macs, even on the latest macOS, can do scaling eg 1.5x at say 1440p, which last time I bothered with an Intel Mac required a workaround via Terminal to re-enable.

But that workaround is “patched” on Apple Silicon and won’t work.

So yes if you have an Apple Silicon Mac plugged into a 1440p display, it will look bad with any sort of “scaling”- because scaling is disabled on macOS for sub-4K displays. What you’re actually doing when you’re “scaling” on say a 1440p display is running that display at 1920x1080 resolution- hence it looks like ass. Back before Apple Silicon, running that 1440p display at “1920x1080” was actually just scaling the UI elements up to appear as though you had a 1920x1080 display- since it was still utilizing the full …x1440 pixels of the display, “1920x1080” looked nicer than it would now.

So brass tacks it’s just about how macOS/OS X would obfuscate the true display resolution in the System Preferences -> Displays menu. Now with Apple Silicon Macs, “1920x1080” means “2x scaling” for 4K monitors and literally “we’ll run this higher-res monitor at literally 1920x1080” for any display under 4K resolution.

[gymbeaux]

If your 1440p monitor looks “fine” or “good”, it’s because the scale is 1x - for many people, including myself, UI elements are too small at 1x 1440p. I had to buy a 4K monitor so I could have larger UI elements AND crisp UI elements.

[extraduder_ire]

You may just not be seeing the visual artifacts on your screen because you don't know what they look like, or mentally adjust to what that screen looks like.

The same way someone might not notice motion smoothing on a TV, or how bad scaling and text rendering looks on a 1366*768 panel, or different colour casts from different display technologies. All three took me a while before I could tell what was wrong without seeing them side by side.

[seec]

This is the biggest issue with Mac hardware at the moment. All because of a decision to make it easier for their developers (and 3rd party too I guess) to be able to claim they figured out high-DPI before everyone else.

It comes at a large cost now, either more money than reasonable for one of the few compatible displays or accept a much worse experience, that is just not good for devices of this price. This is why a big affordable iMac is so necessary, but TC's Apple likes money too much to care about their legacy customers.

After such a long history of Mac OS having better font rendering and in general better graphic stack (Quartz, everything is basically a continuous PDF rendering) feels like a big letdown.

The problem is going to improve as more high-DPI displays are released for sale but it has taken a lot of time because most customers like to focus on other characteristics that are arguably more important for other use cases. There are plenty of premium display that are just good to great but you really have to think how it will work if you buy a Mac, most likely you'll need to compromise, feels bad considering the price of admition...

[johnnyyyy]

Wait about what kind of people are you talking about and how niche is that target group?

You are saying Mac are expensive but at the same time the potential buyers cant afford even a cheap 4K monitor? They go by like 200$? now. and even is that group exists.. its not like 2560p is torture on a Mac especially with that BetterDisplay HiDPI, I would bet many would not even notice the difference.

[stogot]

My silicon Mac is fine on 27” 1080 10 years old display

[baq]

Can confirm, you absolutely need BetterDisplay and a tiny bit of elbow grease to configure the 5k clone to downscale to your real monitor. Not rocket science, but could be more streamlined.

If you say it looks fine without it, I don't know what to say.

[calf]

Is there a review that demonstrates and corroborates this issue? Is it a difficult problem if choosing to buy a new display for a Mac mini? My old display is 10 years old and I would have to get a new one then.

[baq]

It's most visible with the macbooks because you have the retina display and the low dpi display next to each other.

In short: you probably want to get at least a 4k display anyway, but if you want to delay that, you should buy BetterDisplay. The difference is night and day.

[theideaofcoffee]

My 7 year old QHD monitor pair through a M1 Pro MBP still looks fantastic. Then again, I do spend most of my day in apple Terminal, but I'm not really in want of anything more. Some other sibling comments are saying Windows 10/11 looks crappy, and I agree, as I have to occasionally switch between the two, I just don't like working in Windows anymore, mostly because of the poor display.

[seec]

I use both OS on the same display and Windows looks much better on an "old" no Hi-DPI display, I can tell you that much.

I used to dislike Windows font rendering, but it's still better than what macOS gives you for "regular" displays. You can fix it somewhat with BetterDisplay but still...

[vondur]

If you have a 1440P 27" monitor, they work great.

[isametry]

Basically operating at standard pre-Retina Mac DPI levels. The 27" Apple Cinema Display had exactly this resolution, as well as the 27" iMac before it went to 5K.

I agree, it works… fine. But sadly more and more elements of modern macOS will look blurry / aliased because they are only made with hi-DPI in mind.

For example all SF Symbols, as far as I know, are not defined as pixel graphics but only stored as vectors and rasterized on the fly. Which works great at high res and makes them freely scalable, but on low-DPI displays they certainly look worse than a pixel-perfect icon would.

[bni]

No, it looks great on my 1440p OLED. Windows on the other hand in old Control Panel for example it looks like ass.

[culopatin]

There is an app called better display that almost solves this. Has a mode that renders things at higher res and fixes the text blurring

[dogcow]

Came here to echo this. Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. Everything was fuzzy and awful looking. Not something that could be tolerated or ignored... Completely unusable. I feel like this fact is not well known enough.

The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?

This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

[myrandomcomment]

Honestly I am going to say skip 4K and just go to 5K. They are not that much more. I have 2x5K setup and it is great. The main monitor is normal orientation and the other is mounted on the left at a 90 rotation centered on the side of the first. I keep my work on the main and all the documentation, chat, etc. on the vertical one. I hope to be able to ditch the 2 monitor setup next year and go to a single 8K display.

[7e]

4K displays are the new standard. I can buy a 27" IPS 4K display from LG for $200. Anything lower res. is a boomer screen; get rid of it and move on.

[stalfosknight]

Non-Apple displays have awful PPI, even the allegedly high-DPI ones.

[tasty_freeze]

How does that address the point the person you are replying to make:

> something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux.