[da_chicken]

Apple put all their chips behind Retina/HiDPI displays. To that end, they've got really good HiDPI resolution scaling, they no longer sell displays incapable of Retina features (in laptops or stand-alone), and they have removed features that only serve to support sub-4k displays. To Apple, 4k is the minimum standard.

If you want a 2k monitor you can buy one and hook it up, but Apple isn't interested in making it look good. It's a not new decision, either. They stopped selling Macbooks without Retina displays in 2016. They haven't supported 2k scaling since the M1 Mac Mini over 5 years ago: https://www.macworld.com/article/549493/how-to-m1-mac-1440p-...

Apple is not a budget vendor. They're a premium vendor. That's not just what other people call them. It's what they themselves profess to be. That's why you can get an Apple Thunderbolt cable for $70. To Apple, if you buy a Mac Mini, yes they're expecting you to hook it up to a 4k monitor. They expect you to be getting a Mac Mini because you want a Mac, not because you can't afford a Macbook.

[grishka]

Well, in my particular case, I use an M1 Max MBP with a 2K monitor that I already had when I bought the MacBook.

The problem with 27" 4K monitors is that you can't have integer scaling on them. If you set the scaling factor to 1x, everything will be too small, if you set it to 2x, everything will be huge, and macOS can't properly do fractional scaling because what it actually does is render everything into a 2x framebuffer and downscale that for output.

And besides, only supporting HiDPI displays doesn't mean one can stop striving for pixel perfection. I hate SF Symbols icons because they're sizeless. They're an abhorrent blurry mess on my monitor but they're also not all that sharp on the MacBook screen. If you notice it once, it'll haunt you forever. Sorry. They do look fine-ish on iPhones though because those use OLED displays that lack the notion of a pixel grid anyway.

[nullpoint420]

Your sights are set on Apple when IMO, they should be aimed at the rest of the display industry.

Why don’t they produce 5K/6K monitors that allow for 2x integer scaling? The $1,600 Studio Display is only $1,600 because it has no competition.

[grishka]

> Why don’t they produce 5K/6K monitors that allow for 2x integer scaling?

Because 5K panels are probably more expensive to produce than 4K ones, and because that would only benefit Mac users since Windows can do fractional scaling just fine. I'm not sure about that but it might also be that not all GPUs used in PCs can drive monitors larger than 4K.

[cosmic_cheese]

Even if Windows/Linux do fractional scaling fine, integer scaling is still desirable if it’s an option. Under both I still run into programs that botch fractional scaling some way or another, and given the proclivity of programs on both platforms to be built with oddball UI toolkits I don’t expect that to ever really fully resolve itself.

It’s one of the chief complaints I have with one of my mostly otherwise good x86 laptops. The 1.5x scaling the display needs has been a pain point on multiple occasions.