You won't notice 8ms difference in input lag
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Mine as well. What is the likelihood this will happen?
I have a hunch it will not and they will either scrap the nano texture completely or keep it as differentiator for the Pro line, but I am curious what others think.
Does anyone have any feedback on the new M5 models?
I agree on the nano-texture display having used one in person for a little bit. It's sort of like an ultra fine matte texture that isn't noticable while using it, but is noticable compared to other devices in the same room. I hope it becomes a more standard option on future devices.
That said, I've used Thinkpads with matte displays and while not as fine, they mostly have the same benefit.
i noticed my ola macbook pro was connected to my router even when it was sleeping.. probably sending some private info periodically to apple and cia
Or just search for "Power Nap" (what it used to be called). They usually wake up intermittently for Time Machine backups, wake-on-lane and other stuff.
> Like a better finder experience.
> Or keeping screen on.
Do you mind linking or naming which tools you use for those 2 purposes?
Asking out of pure curiosity, as for keeping the screen on, I just use `caffeinate -imdsu` in the terminal. Previously used Amphetamine, but I ended up having some minor issues with it, and I didn't need any of its advanced features (which could definitely be useful to some people, I admit, just not me). I just wanted to have a simple toggle for "keep the device and/or display from sleeping" mode, so I just switched to `caffeinate -imdsu` (which is built-in).
As for Finder, I didn't really feel the need for anything different, but I would gladly try out and potentially switch to something better, if you are willing to recommend your alternative.
This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.
Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.
This is a quiet boon for those who enjoy working outdoors but find the sun/brightness a problem.
Times changed and the best hardware for me right now is a Dell XPS from the model lines a few years back that looked like an aluminum sandwich with a black plastic filling. These machines are fantastic but (1) no OLED, (2) now high speed refresh rate, and (3) the keyboard isn’t great.
Could this modern Apple hardware bring me back to Free OS on pretty hardware, or is there something else I should try?
Glossy was an available option, but not the product line wide choice.
The top of the line Late 2008 MacBook Pro (not Unibody) included: > An antiglare CCFL-backlit 17" widescreen 1680x1050 active-matrix display (a glossy display was offered via build-to-order at no extra cost, and a higher resolution LED-backlit 1920x1200 display also was offered for an extra US$100).
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...
But yeah if you wanna run 600B+ weights models your gonna need an insane setup to run it locally.
“I don’t use this computer for serious work.” Dropped $3K on MBP to play around with. Definitely should have gotten MBA
Meanwhile if you need widespread compatibility nearly everything supports exFAT and if you need a real filesystem then the Mac and Windows drivers for open source filesystems are less likely to corrupt your data.
I haven't seen a single display that ever overcame that properly for long term work. Sure, phones use it but they increased luminosity to absurd level to be readable, not a solution I prefer for daily long work.
I admit there are corner cases of pro graphics where it made sense (with corresponding changes to environment) but I am not discussing this here.
It is probably a pretty good screen, though.
I don’t really like Apple overall. But, to some extent, it’s like… well, maybe that’s a good way of selling incremental engineering improvements.
ok, i guess for graphic designers it might matter more?
I don't recall Apple ever "insisting" anything about glossy vs. matte. They simply eliminated the matte option without comment, and finally brought it back many years later.
If you have a reference to a public statement from Apple defending the elimination of the matte option, I'd like to see it.
To be clear, I've been complaining about glossy Macs ever since matte was eliminated, and I too purchased an M4 MacBook Pro soon after it was available.
And that's when they let you modify/use your OS the way you want.
You know what's glossy? Movie posters and postcards.
The coatings, which do matter quite a bit when you are optimising for some durability/optical quality tradeoff.
Glass covers make screens more durable, but imply internal and external reflections. Laminated screens on glass panes solves the internal reflections and improve transmission, but do not help with glare and external reflections. Those can be improved by texturing the glass, but at the cost of diffraction and smearing, leading to a decrease in effective resolution. Unless the texture becomes small enough, but then you need it to be durable enough to avoid being wiped or damaged by things that might come into contact with the screen.
It turns out that there is a lot more than the bottom layers that matter in a display. You can see all these problems being solved in succession when looking at the evolution of Apple’s displays over the years (and others’, but it is much easier to find information about the good and bad sides of any Apple product). It’s fascinating, actually.
[edit] add the issue of oils on the human skin and you have do deal with oleophobic coatings for touch screens, which is another very important factor to consider. In addition to how the touch sensors are integrated.
No; you can adjust screen brightness just fine with the built-in settings, including with the F1 and F2 keys (plus the Fn key if you've got them set that way).
This Vivid app is specifically for extra HDR levels of brightness. I've never had a problem with my M1 or M4 MBPs, either inside or outside, with the built-in brightness levels. (But, to be fair, I don't use it outside a lot.)
Wasn’t the matte option that disappeared just then removing the glass in front of the screen? I seem to remember that (my MBP from that time was glossy).
The nano textured coating they are using now is quite complex and I am not quite sure it was applicable at such scales cheaply enough back in 2015.
When your screen can do 1,600 nits, daylight isn't as much of a problem
The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.
Which some people do, but I don't think the average person asking this question does (and I don't)
A glossy option was introduced in 2006, but the MacBook Pro was still matte by default.
In 2008, the MacBook Pro case was redesigned, and then the display situation changed significantly.
To get to actual 1600 nits you need to use scripts.
https://github.com/SerjoschDuering/macbook_1600nits
Not sure the impacts to display health or battery running the screen full bore like this.
There's a graininess to the screen that makes it feel a little worse at all times, meanwhile I never had a problem in daylight just cranking brightness into the XDR range using Lunar.
It's especially noticeable on light UIs, where empty space gets an RGB "sparkle" to it. I noticed the same thing when picking out my XDR years ago, so it seems like they never figured out how to solve it.
It’s still a great laptop except the battery lasts maybe 75 mins. I just keep it plugged in but despite the fact it’s 6 years old I don’t notice any problems with it.
I’m tempted to buy an M4 laptop just because it’s “new” and “faster” but then I ask myself Why? It’s the same thing with my iPhone. Until my laptop dies or there is something functional that I can’t do with my old laptop I’m going to keep using it.
The thing that mostly irks me about Apple these days is soldered in RAM and non-upgradeable storage. Apple is still the best thing going for doing most pro development work, but it's just so irritating that they shit on us like this. I did buy an M4 Mini and expanded it some. My 2019 MB Pro is siting here on the desk, mostly unused these days. The Intel Macs are basically dead now--still great computers, but no longer desirable. My daughter is doing Graphic Arts in college and is using another 2019 Pro for that. I've used Macs continuously since at least 2014.
Isn't the 'soldered-in' RAM and storage fundamental to the M-series architecture? It's not like there's a board with individual chips sitting in it for the RAM and storage, that could potentially have been 'popped out' if they weren't soldered in. It's all one giant 'chip' now.
The distribution is highly skewed. Like wealth. The 99th percentile are near the top in rank (by definition) but nowhere near the top in absolute terms.
They were absolutely noticable. Contrast was crap. I immediately went with glossy with my next MBP around that same period.
Unless you’re making Instagram content, very few photographers use HDR. Everything else will look the same on both screens.
Not my experience in lit environments. Looking at a mirror-like surface trying to distinguish content from reflections is exhausting.
Unless I blast my eyes at full brightness which is more exhausting.
This is nearly my preferred setup, only I have wall lights on the wall behind the monitors so it's not truly a dark room (which is horrible for your eyes). No over head lights allowed on while I'm at the keyboard.
At least to me, with corrected vision, a high quality 1080p video looks better than streaming quality 4k at the same distance.
But if there’s a window or something bright behind you, the specular reflection from the glossy and generally not anti reflective coated screen can be so bright and so full of high frequency details that it almost completely obscures the image.
And since I might be trying to work involving text in a cafe as opposed to doing detailed artistic work in a studio, I would much prefer the matte surface.
OP: I've tried all the Finder replacements. Path Finder, for example. At the end of the day, I went back to Finder. I always have a single window on screen with the tabs that I use all day. This helps enormously. I show it on YouTube here (direct timestamp link): https://youtu.be/BzJ8j0Q_Ed4?si=VVMD54EJ-XsxkYzm&t=338
You can use Raycast to directly open files. I show that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbtoR2q_Ds&t=482s - still doesn't make it a Finder replacement.
It is rather shocking how much faster everything feels given I didn't think my old macbook pro was slow. While I expected xcode builds to be faster (and they are), I was a bit shocked when opening a new firefox tab was instantaneous since I hadn't noticed it wasn't before.
Another thing I didn't expect is that the new speakers have noticeably more bass and can get quite a bit louder.
I didn't get the nano-textured display, because having to adjust the display angle to get colors to render correctly is more annoying than having to do it for glare (I don't work in a high-glare environment).
If page load seems noticeably faster, it’s far more likely that it’s simply a faster machine. Or imaginary.
My mom has an M1 air, and its resolution is not great. Everything looks a bit blurry compared with my 4K Dell XPS my wife’s MacBook Pro m4 display. I guess the air’s native resolution means it has to do fractional scaling.
I still say for comfortable all day viewing and productivity, there is no comparison. Glossy does have more pop on a phone or watching movies in the dark, but I'd go blind doing that all day every day..
I am with you in preferring matte. For me, mostly because of reflections on glossy screens.
I receive these highly polished emails from people and am just annoyed. Do you expect me to answer your robot?!
Maybe there needs to be a bad style minimum for a forum in the future. Only human imperfections allowed.
Ok. Of topic maybe.
I love the Nano texture displays. And the glossy glass ones were also great and the best ones out there.
I also use 60Hz screens just fine, saying that getting used to 120Hz ruins slower displays is being dramatic. You can readjust to 60Hz again within 5 minutes. But I can still instantly tell which is higher refresh rate, at least up to 360Hz.
I'd much rather do that than to have a granier screen with worse viewing angles all the time I'm not in direct sunlight, so next time around I'll be back on glossy.
I would say it's worth the extra, what, $200 or so? on the price of the M4 MBP. If it were much more expensive, I would be less sure.
Judging by the authors preference for Linux, I’m guessing this hobby has some professional applications as well.
$3k is the price of a very nice guitar, but I am not about to casually shell out that money every few years.
However, I earn my wage using a computer, so it’s a lot easier to justify staying relatively current on specs.
My most recent laptop died and it really showed me what I appreciate in a laptop, performance, build quality, lightweight, good battery, low noise, good ergonomics.
I was sick of the recent overheating generation of pc laptops that don't last more than a couple years under my usage.
As a result I decided to try to switch back to a macbook after a decade hiatus.
The hardware is good but the software is absolute garbage. Trialing it for a week the amount of bullshit that is MacOS was enough, and Asahi wasn't there yet either. Instead I decided to get an AMD framework laptop.
Best decision ever.
I have a laptop that's got great quality, can be upgraded without paying a $5k tax, can replace the keyboard for $100 instead of $700, it works with me rather than against me and my wallet.
> “…the MacBook provides incredibly crisp images with richer colors, deeper blacks and significantly greater contrast…”
This is positioning for glossy being superior.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2006/05/16Apple-Unveils-New-M...
While it serves a useful purpose by diffusing unavoidable point light sources in uncontrolled environments, it's honestly not much of an improvement over its glossy contemporaries in sunlight and other brightly-lit environments, as diffusing already diffuse reflections has little effect.
OLED glossy on the iPad Pro is even better.
1ms seems less believable, but I wouldn't be surprised, if some people could notice that too.
The other quote is just a list of ways in which the screen is better.
It is YOU that is conflating these and saying that this list of improvements is down to glossiness, not Apple.
But their keyboards are still the best, and trackpoint is unmatched. As soon as System76 or Framework or any other vendor offer that, I'm giving them my money.
You guys need to stop reading apple advertisement material and take it for gospel just because it has some fancy scientific words in it.
I think you may have mixed up mini-LED backlighting with OLED and microLED displays. mini-LED backlights merely allow for better local dimming of the backlight behind an LCD, but the number of independently variable backlight zones is still orders of magnitude smaller than the number of pixels. Over short distances, an LCD with local dimming is still susceptible to all of the contrast-limiting downsides of an LCD with a uniform static backlight (and local dimming brings new challenges of its own).
OLED is the mainstream display technology where individual pixels directly emit their own light, so you can truly have a completely black pixel next to a lit pixel. But there are still layers and coatings between the OLED and the user, so infinite contrast isn't actually achievable.
microLED is an unsuccessful technology to provide the benefits of OLED without as many of the downsides (primarily, the uneven aging). But nobody has managed to make large microLED displays economically yet, and it doesn't look like the tech will be going mainstream anytime soon.
It’s once you get “serious” and need to have your own equipment that all these things get real. Or in the case of things like social dance, you want to take time off with and travel further and further away to attend pricey exchanges and camps.
[0] EDIT: for reference, my previous ThinkPad lasted me 14 years.
A computer is many, many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than that.
This isn't said with the intention to demonize expensive hobbies if no one is harmed because of it.
But I do sometimes wonder if my hobbies are too dependent of a power plug. Even reading, which I do with a e-reader.
I've only purchased matte screen laptops because I only use them for travel. Lenovo pretty much.
Also prefer semi-gloss for my monitors as I work in well lit daylight conditions if I can help it. There have been very high quality semi-gloss monitors for ages now.
I'm always so jealous of these people, 60hz is just so bad for me now and even make me a bit motion sick.
I can see it in everything, moving the window, scrolling, the cursor.
Curiously, it is able to maintain network connection even through the 1/4" steel of the safe it's stored within. The older Intel MBP doesn't and cannot.
That would both get you easier compatibility between Mac and Linux and solve the NTFS write issue without any more trouble than it's giving people now because then you'd just install the ext4 driver on the Windows machine instead of the NTFS driver on the Mac.
In many areas there’s a tendency to overdo it with tools, gadgets and also to compensate for lack of skill with more gadgets. I do woodworking for example and my total spend for industrial vacuum, different types of power and hand tools, work bench, clamps, etc probably comes to around a few thousand EUR. Mine is a really good set-up for a hobby, but I still don’t have any stationary machines or fancy separate work area or room. I bought everything over the years and I only buy brand-name. My point is, this is actually a lot of money especially if spent as lump sum and not at all a “nothing-burger”.
Anyway, Apple SoC in M series is a huge leverage thanks to shared memory: VRAM size == RAM size so if you buy M chip with 128+ Gb memory, you’re pretty much able to run SOTA models locally, and price is significantly lower than AI GPU cards
There's less ghosting in 240hz.
And scrolling on 60hz to me looks blurry.
I'd like to think that those who don't notice the difference have improved brain GPUs that can compensate for ghosting.
I always thought matte photos were more readable, but glossy used to be more wow and have “deeper blacks”.
This is, by far, the fastest machine I've ever had. My previous laptop was a more modest M1 mac book pro. And before that I was on a cheapo intel i5 Samsung laptop - a stop gap solution after my last intel mac died when a loose keyboard key destroyed the screen (yep the generation with the crappy keyboards, worst mac I've ever owned). That intel was of course pathetic and shit. I wasn't expecting much and it disappointed me despite that. The M1 was about 3x faster. The M4 Max is a beast. In terms of build speeds, the i5 was unusable while building and would take 15 minutes. The M1 got it down to 5 minutes (10 CPU cores that are faster than the 4 intel ones). But it didn't have enough memory so swapping slowed it down a bit. The M4 max builds stuff in around 30 seconds. No more swapping and the 14 cores are quite a bit faster than the M1 ones. Same project (but of course with a few years of development). We have more tests now, not fewer.
Otherwise it's a great laptop. Keyboard is fine. Touchpad is best in class in the industry (everything else is pathetically mediocre in comparison; it's not even close), the screen is best in class as well (contrast, colors, resolution, everything). And Apple learned it's lesson when it comes to keyboards. Most windows/linux laptops I'm aware off are a compromise between heating/cooling, lousy input and output devices, performance, design, screen quality, etc. Apple nails all of those things. Nobody else does.
High end Macs are not cheap. But for professionals it's a minor expense. If you lease a car for getting your ass to work every morning, you are probably spending 2-3x more at least than what this would cost you. And the whole point of getting to work is to open your laptop and earn a living with it. It's more important than the damn car. It's what pays for that car. I spend less than what used to be 1 hour of my freelance rate per month on this absolute monster. Maybe it's 2 hours for you if you just got started. That's still nothing on 160ish billable hours per month. Employers tend to be less enlightened of course. But if it's your choice, don't be frugal and buy the laptop you need. If a simple browser is all you need, of course get something decent looking like a mac book air or whatever. But otherwise, get the best you can afford. I've compromised once with that Samsung. I did not enjoy that.
Thanks again!
It's not what is implied by the parent post - where the mac is limiting the brightness only to have the app unlock it.
New super high-res displays are also nice on my eyes. The displays in between, those from the last decade or so, have been hit or miss for me.
I’ve taken my 10 euro dance classes for years without feeling the necessity of pricey exchanges and camps.
My neighbour goes to the park many evenings to play petanque, doesn’t cost him anything.
A couple I’m friends with goes on day hikes where they do bird watching—maybe they bought a nice pair of binoculars once? Another couple likes to lay jigsaw puzzles together, not exactly breaking the bank!
My sister is learning Finnish because she never learned a non indo-european language. She bought a book.
I would wager most people’s hobbies are low key like this because either they don’t have disposable income to spend on them, or they don’t want too!
Glasses make a huge difference when watching TV, and are the dividing line between being able to tell the difference between 4K and 1080p and not being able to discern any.
I get very frustrated with the kind of people who see one tiktok about a thing and suddenly feel like they need to spend $3k to pursue whatever their new passion is.
On a perfect display you should see just a faint grey circle.
Another test is moving cursor fast across the white page and tracking it with eyes. On a perfect display it should be perfectly crisp, on my display it blurs and moves in steps.
So basically on a perfect display you can track fast moving things, and when not tracking, they are blurred. On a bad display, things blur when tracking them, and you see several instances otherwise. For example, if you scroll a page with a black box up-down, on a bad display you would see several faint boxes overlayed, and on a perfect display one box with blurred edges.
I don’t know how many milliseconds the difference is, but going back and forth it’s so obvious to me that it’s painful.
A sentence in a PR that highlights an indisputable advantage of a glossy display does not position glossy as being superior overall but merely superior in the respects mentioned, which is not controversial.
Moreover, Apple continued to offer a matte display in the MacBook Pro for years after that PR, so why would they sell an "inferior" option?
However, I'm typing this on my Dell monitor which only does 60 Hz. It honestly doesn't bother me at all. Sure, when I scroll long pages I see the difference: the text isn't legible. But, in practice, I never read moving text.
However, one thing on which I can't go back is resolution. A 32" 4k screen is the minimum for me. I was thinking about getting a wider screen, but they usually have less vertical resolution than my current one. A 14" MBP is much more comfortable when looking at text all day then my 14" HP with FHD screen. And it's not just because the colors and contrast are better, it's because the text is sharper.
What I've found, is that inside, the HP is much better at handling reflections. However, outside, the screen gets washed out and is next to unusable. Whereas on the MBP, I can usually find an angle where reflections don't bother me and I can spend hours using it.
In tracking motion your eyes/brain can see improved motion resolution (how clear the details are in an object moving across the screen) up to 1000Hz.
Just to be pedantic it is integer scaled (from 1440x900 to 2880x1800 but then resampled down to the native resolution of the MBA 2560x1600 via something better than bilinear).
Personally I've had concussions and bad screens do make me sick. Even 60hz TVs if I'm sitting somewhat close, particularly for certain content. All the chaos of Dr. Strange / Multiverse was too much for me to watch.
Most people who’ve used both 60 and 120 could tell, definitely if a game is running. Unless you’re asking me to distinguish between like 110 and 120, but that’s like asking someone to distinguish between roughly 30 and 32.
North of 120 it gets trickier to notice no matter what IMO.
I can live with 60 but 85+ is where I’m happy.
Wow. My perspective was those that did notice the difference were more perceptive. Thank you - now I realize there is a completely different take. (I'm not sure that it's helpful mind you... but it gives me something to chew on).
For screen with 60 FPS, the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS was pretty obvious and I could guess it 100% of the time.
For screen with 144FPS, the difference between 72FPS and 144FPS was not obvious at all and I couldn't reliably guess it at all. I also checked it with a few other persons, and they all failed this simple test.
So now I'm holding firm opinion, that these high-FPS displays are marketing gimmick.
https://pastebin.com/raw/hwR62Yhi here's HTML, save it and open. left click reveals which half is "fast" (full FPS) or "slow" (half FPS), scroll changes speed, F5 generates new test.
Patently false on modern MacOS. I get a reminder about Tahoe every week or two. Plus a persistent red "1" dot in the Settings app that you can't dismiss. And a huge info/advert panel in the 'Software Update' section of Settings about Tahoe, that you can't dismiss.
Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.
While I agree the jump from 60 -> 140 hz/fps is not as noticeable as 30 -> 60, calling everything above 60 a ”marketing gimmick” is silly. When my screen or TV falls back to 60hz for whatever reason I can notice it immediately, you don’t have to do anything else than move your mouse or scroll down a webpage.
If they're working perfectly, why does it matter if they have current operating support? It doesn't seem like you're dependent on Apple.
The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.
The Mac is a bit more resilient to this, but it’s still worrying as yearly improvements become subtler.
`caffeinate -d` in the terminal - it’s built-in
Obviously you can spend pretty much any amount of money on those if you want (if you are "serious" about it) but you don't have to and most people don't. Also he said this $3k expenditure wasn't for serious work.
Many universities in rural areas have student clubs that offer lessons and rent club owned planes for cheap.
i think i'll be upgrading in the next 2 or maybe 3 years if apple puts OLED screens on their new machines as it is rumored.
I want to find a way to revive the hobby by showing younger people short on money that they can get into sailing for less than they already spend on much less rewarding stuff like app subscriptions and smartphones.