Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels.

This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.

Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.

If anything, Apple was right back then. Glossy has so many benefits for the places where you’d use a computer, it’s not even close. Having the option to pay premium for those few that work in environments where matte helps them makes sense. I’d pay money for my display to not be matte.

Apple was actually late to the glossy display party. HP and Dell moved to them a few years before Apple. I don't think Apple was "insisting" on them, but rather following an industry trend that they were late to.

I wonder if they will (re)introduce premium keyboards with sculpted keys that self-center your fingers someday. magsafe coming back was nice, maybe more extra ports?

They are really good at selling a small quantitative improvement that causes them to start using something, as a new type of thing going from impossible to possible. As if the tech didn’t just didn’t exist before Apple started using it.

It is probably a pretty good screen, though.

I don’t really like Apple overall. But, to some extent, it’s like… well, maybe that’s a good way of selling incremental engineering improvements.

As someone who buys and likes Apple stuff, I agree, it's a signature move from them.

i recently worked with a macbook pro and it caused uncomfortable feelings of eyestrain. i had some app that was supposed to disable the temporal dithering but i'm not sure if it helped. i'm curious if there's anyone else on here like me who has experienced eyestrain with macbooks where the nano texture display has helped.

> It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option

I don't recall Apple ever "insisting" anything about glossy vs. matte. They simply eliminated the matte option without comment, and finally brought it back many years later.

If you have a reference to a public statement from Apple defending the elimination of the matte option, I'd like to see it.

To be clear, I've been complaining about glossy Macs ever since matte was eliminated, and I too purchased an M4 MacBook Pro soon after it was available.

It’s classic Apple commenter not know about Apple. They offered matte display upgrades to the MacBook Pro almost 20 years ago. The current glossy black display only became a product line wide choice with the retina displays in 2012, likely because they didn’t prioritize getting an appropriate matte glass finish on the retina screens due to low demand.

It's certainly on brand for Apple to face widespread criticism in the past for having matte screens as the default (computer magazines of the day found that matte finishes made screens too dim) only to face renewed criticism for dropping the thing they were previously criticized for.

If you are going to start making a list of expensive hobbies, $3K for a computer isn't going to be anywhere near the top of the list.

He lives in Switzerland. $3K barely pays for a lunch and an espresso.

This is funny because MBA could mean two things.

Lmao plus MBA works great for relatively serious work. I was hesitant to switch from MBP but the M1 air almost never lets me down.

It's the first matte screen on a MacBook since 2011.

I ran that thing for like 6 years til the replacement for the failed GPU failed again.

More matte screens please!

I’d love an air with a high density display.

My mom has an M1 air, and its resolution is not great. Everything looks a bit blurry compared with my 4K Dell XPS my wife’s MacBook Pro m4 display. I guess the air’s native resolution means it has to do fractional scaling.

I think my ideal would be a MacBook Air with both the nano-texture and higher 120hz refresh rate the Pro has. With that, I'll trade an extra second of compile time for my rust projects for the smaller form factor.

Dang I was gonna get one with nano texture but the opinion was 50/50 everywhere so I went with the Devil I know

There’s an awesome app called Vivid which just opens the HDR max brightness. I use it all the time with my M3 Pro when working outside and I believe it also works on earlier models.

But are these llms worth their salt?

If you bought a fully-featured computer that supports compute shaders and didn't run local LLMs, you should be protesting in the street.

Can't you run small LLMs on like... a Macbook air M1? Some models are under 1B weights, they will be almost useless but I imagine you could run them on anything from the last 10 years.

But yeah if you wanna run 600B+ weights models your gonna need an insane setup to run it locally.

Not just that but you can use Brightentosh to force it on.

I live in a sunny place with big windows and basically use it all day every day. When it turns off my screen feels broken I so prefer the brightness.

Normal content is still limited to 500 nits, and these being mini-LED displays, contrast is already infinite.

Unless you’re making Instagram content, very few photographers use HDR. Everything else will look the same on both screens.

Asahi (Linux) lags quite far behind the latest Apple hardware release. If you want the Linux experience on Apple hardware, I think the best move is full-screen VM. Performance of that is more than good enough, but it does mean you are running a full non-free software stack to get to your free software VM.

I bought one of those iBooks for Debian linux, but I found the resolution was a bit small for X. At the time, I had a thing for non-intel architectures. Prior to that, I had done a lot of work packaging up Debian for Sparc machines. I had access to a wide variety of Sun workstations at my job as a sysadmin at a university.

lots of people can notice that. my last job involved meticulously timing our software's input-tp-display latency, testing viewers' responses to it, and fighting for each and every ms we should shave off of it.

Anyone can notice an entire frame of input lag.

The question is more whether it’ll bother you.

I have 165Hz monitors. Software feels noticeably more snappy.

Musicians can feel latencies as low as 1ms.

Apple is designing pro gear for its target audience.

agree

Mine too, and I bought an air in the last generation and I barely use it because I thought the 60hz display would be ok, but I've been living with 120's everywhere for long enough the 60hz is actually horrible to use now. First world problems for sure, but it's enough that I literally don't use the machine.

I’ve used MBP for many many years, but recently bought an MB Air. I slightly miss the extra ports. I love how much lighter it is. I never notice a speed difference. I’m always ssh’d into a Linux box if crunching any real data, and for UI stuff the CPU doesn’t need a fan at all. Definitely gonna stick with MB Air.

Honestly I hate giving money to Lenovo, they're one of the worst companies I've had to deal with at least when it comes to support.

It's because Apple sucks the least. They still suck, though. They could build decent computers that are upgradeable, but they refuse because they want your $$$$ in large amounts.

I upgraded from M4 to M5 MBP because I broke my M4's screen and so my company ordered a replacement M5 while the M4 is being repaired. I can't really notice a difference at all. It's an absolute work horse, but so was the M4. I _did_ spring for the nano texture display this time around, and that is definitely nice (but nothing to do with the M5)

I just upgraded from an M1 to an M5 a couple days ago.

It is rather shocking how much faster everything feels given I didn't think my old macbook pro was slow. While I expected xcode builds to be faster (and they are), I was a bit shocked when opening a new firefox tab was instantaneous since I hadn't noticed it wasn't before.

Another thing I didn't expect is that the new speakers have noticeably more bass and can get quite a bit louder.

I didn't get the nano-textured display, because having to adjust the display angle to get colors to render correctly is more annoying than having to do it for glare (I don't work in a high-glare environment).

>The thing that mostly irks me about Apple these days is soldered in RAM and non-upgradeable storage.

Isn't the 'soldered-in' RAM and storage fundamental to the M-series architecture? It's not like there's a board with individual chips sitting in it for the RAM and storage, that could potentially have been 'popped out' if they weren't soldered in. It's all one giant 'chip' now.

I was able to switch the App Store language from English to Spanish by changing my primary language in System Settings > Language & Region > Preferred Languages.

It didn't require me to switch my region or payment method.

That seems like classic Apple, really.

Why did you think Apple was user friendly or flexible...it's the Apple way or the highway. Most only stick around because of the currently superior hardware

Or people who read text.

If you'd like to change that, you can go to System Settings → Battery → Options → Wake for Network Access

Or just search for "Power Nap" (what it used to be called). They usually wake up intermittently for Time Machine backups, wake-on-lane and other stuff.

macOS does not have auto update. In fact it doesn't bother you with any updates which lead to me behind patches behind because I was accustomed to Windows nagging me for updates every week.