[hombre_fatal]

I'd wager that you'd notice the difference when using higher refresh rates regularly and then downgrading. I think that's a cruel thing to do to yourself though.

I remember when I first saw a high-def Retina Macbook, I didn't appreciate it. I happily programmed on my low resolution Macbook Air, snug as a bug in a rug.

I eventually upgraded to a Retina Macbook. One day I opened up my old low-res Macbook to recover some old files and I was horrified at how bad it looked. You could see the damn pixels! Text on that screen was so blocky. I couldn't believe I happily used that laptop for so long.

Is a Retina screen useful? Sure. Did my happiness increase? I don't think so. Does my screen eat up much more battery lighting up many more pixels? Probably.

Sometimes it's nice to be happy with the minimum and not ruin by chasing upgrades.

[karmakaze]

It wasn't actually that bad at the time. Check what version of macOS that old MacBook has been updated to. Apple nerfed macOS when they introduced Retina displays so that it only does gray pixel anti-aliasing when earlier they did subpixel RGB anti-aliasing.

I just got Better Display[0] which works great for driving non-retina-density monitors with HiDPI resolutions that do anti-aliasing better.

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/buy

[1] https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

[Guvante]

Retina everyone liked. Increased refresh rate is sketchier.