[riceart]

> a design is something that stays forever and you see vestiges of

No, that’s not how it works - this is engineering, not Deepak Chopra. Apple is not big on backward compat and legacy and when a compromise has to be made to favor either their current line up or legacy/3rd party they always choose the former.

For instance new versions of macOS simply don’t support subpixel AA anymore because no standard Apple config involves non hidpi displays. Additionally, macOS renders via framebuffer scaling, not flexible UI scaling (with some good reasons for this compromise), but it’s a compromise and non retina font rendering suffers for it.

Correctly configured Windows and Linux offer superior font rendering on non HiDPI and Linux is easily tunable to be subjectively better on any config.