[jeroenhd]

> the world has increasingly moved to Retina-type displays

Not my world. Even the display hooked up to the crispy work MacBook is still 1080p (which looks really funky on macOS for some reason).

Even in tech circles, almost everyone I know still has a 1080p laptop. Maybe some funky 1200p resolution to make the screen a bit bigger, but the world is not as retina as you may think it is.

For some reason, there's actually quite a price jump from 1080p to 4k unless you're buying a television. I know the panels are more expensive, but I doubt the manufacturer is indeed paying twice the price for them.

[josephg]

My desktop monitor is a 47” display … also running at 4k. It’s essentially a TV, adapted into a computer monitor. It takes up the whole width of my desk.

It’s an utterly glorious display for programming. I can have 3 full width columns of code side by side. Or 2 columns and a terminal window.

But the pixels are still the “normal” size. Text looks noticeably sharper with sub-pixel rendering. I get that subpixel rendering is complex and difficult to implement correctly, but it’s good tech. It’s still much cheaper to have a low resolution display with subpixel font rendering than render 4x as many pixels. To get the same clean text rendering at this size, I’d need an 8k display. Not only would that cost way more money, but rendering an 8k image would bring just about any computer to its knees.

It’s too early to kill sub pixel font rendering. It’s good. We still need it.

[HappMacDonald]

Reading this message on a 4k (3840x2160 UHD) monitor I bought ten (10) years ago for $250usd.

Still bemoaning the loss of the basically impossible (50"? I can't remember precisely) 4k TV we bought that same year for $800usd when every other 4k model that existed at the time was $3.3k and up.

It's black point was "when rendering a black frame the set 100% appears to be unpowered" and the whitepoint was "congratulations, this is what it looks like to stare into baseball stadium floodlights". We kept it at 10% brightness as a matter of course and still playing arbitrary content obviated the need for any other form of lighting in our living room and dining room combined at night.

It was too pure for this world and got destroyed by one of the kids throwing something about in the living room. :(

[MindSpunk]

MacOS looks garbage on non-retina displays largely because they don't do any sub pixel AA for text.

[zajio1am]

AFAIK MacOS looks garbage on standard resolution displays mainly because they don't do any grid-fitting.

I (on Linux) do not use any sub-pixel AA (just regular AA), but i use aggressive grid-fitting and i have nice, sharp text.