M4 MacBook Pros use a quantum dot (QD) film rather than a red KSF phosphor film

I don’t care how much they improve the CPUs, not upgrading before OLED

is OLED unequivocally better than IPS?

the pixel response and contrast absolutely are. Battery life is a little worse (especially in bright mode). OLED pixel response is around 100 micro-seconds compared to ~5ms for IPS, and each pixel dims individually allowing for actually good HDR

I think so, more vivid colors and better blacks and viewing angles. At the risk of burnin.

I'm just worried about the burn in from coding

If you buy a macbook it's supposed to last a long time, but I'm kind of skeptical of getting one right when they release instead of a tried and tested IPS mbp

Does a bear relieve himself in the woods?

Make the screen a wear item then.

OLED has been better in every way except longevity since 2018.

6 years later I’m not buying a piece of garbage LCD for $6k

I've heard that there are screen lifetime issues?

Also, from my limited experience with a single OLED screen, it seems that most stuff was created for a certain kind of screen without as much colour fidelity, and now that stuff seems far more...obnoxiously "saturated"?...on an OLED screen.

Doesn’t OLED pixel layout not line up with modern text rendering engines? At least that’s what I believe I’ve read from reports on banding around text on Windows in particular that makes long-running text work a problem.

That depends which OLED panel you're talking about; they're not all the same.

People read text on the OLED screen of the iPad Pro all the time.

Lots of devices that come with OLED displays come with a "vibrancy" mode turned on by default that oversaturates colors until you turn it off. It does look great at a glance tho!

Yeah think its a ClearType issue[0] specifically then

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

See reply to sibling

Freetype also doesn't do the right thing on RGBW at least. Reading code in the repo suggests it's possible to reconfigure it to work properly with the Harmony algorithm but I haven't worked out how yet. If anyone knows how to sponsor efforts to fix this I would totally contribute to that.

A separate problem is that I don't think there is a standard way for monitors to communicate the subpixel layout in such a way the font rendering engine will have access to it. That seems like a pretty big oversight when introducing these in the first place.

I can't imagine subpixel rendering is at all worth it on modern DPIs

There was a time that OLED problems were so huge Lenovo cancelled their usage on laptops for many years (e.g X1 Yoga Series). It was so bad that I got the next generation laptop for free when it was released.

Shouldn’t be an issue under macOS for the most part, which has used grayscale antialiasing for several years since subpixel AA isn’t of much benefit with HiDPI displays and complicates text rendering considerably.

If there are any problems, it’ll probably be with cross platform software that doesn't use native text rendering and assumes RGB subpixel arrangements instead of obeying the system.

For what use case? Watching a movie on anything that isn’t OLED is a painful experience for me now, but coding backends on an IPS is perfectly fine.

> I've heard that there are screen lifetime issues?

This has gotten much, much better, especially with "tandem OLED" where you just stack two of 'em on top of each other. It should be fine these days.

> Also, from my limited experience with a single OLED screen, it seems that most stuff was created for a certain kind of screen without as much colour fidelity, and now that stuff seems far more...obnoxiously "saturated"?...on an OLED screen.

That's up to the display manufacturer to calibrate the screen. The content should just be what it is and specify its colorspace properly. (Note, "properly" depends on the environment around you, so if you really care about this you have to participate too.)

OLED has had lower peak brightness than IPS. It may not be perceptually so because of no-backlight absolute blacks and higher contrast, but the difference starts to matter in broad daylight where OLED may not be bright enough, irrespective of matte vs glossy.

Conversely lots of contents is produced on/for less-than-stellar displays and gamma+color-profiles-be-damned overcompensate with more saturated colours at the data level because it's going to show up toned down.

When a display is actually able to put out the colours it then looks gaudily oversaturated. I've had such problems already with non-OLED "somewhat† calibrated" good quality screens as well.

† I mean I did not calibrate them, they were factory calibrated with a good enough test curve slip in the package.

in addition to tandem OLED...

Pixel aperture ratio has increased drastically since the early displays. This drops current density for a given amount of light output, and there's a nonlinear relationship between current density and segregation so that helps a ton.

Deuterium helps make more light per unit current, improves current density, improves lifetime.

Microlensing of your customers will accept narrower viewing angle, improves brightness and lifetime in the same way.