My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.

I wonder if they will (re)introduce premium keyboards with sculpted keys that self-center your fingers someday. magsafe coming back was nice, maybe more extra ports?

Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels.

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.

It’s classic Apple commenter not know about Apple. They offered matte display upgrades to the MacBook Pro almost 20 years ago. The current glossy black display only became a product line wide choice with the retina displays in 2012, likely because they didn’t prioritize getting an appropriate matte glass finish on the retina screens due to low demand.

Are you an Apple commenter?

Sounds like Apple marketing wankery. I have a matte high density LCD from 2013 (Lenovo) that looks great. Does Apple even make the displays? What exactly are they "engineering" here?

As someone who buys and likes Apple stuff, I agree, it's a signature move from them.

I can make the same argument about you. Matte display was the standard prior to Unibody MacBook Pros in 2008.

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...

Somebody drank its portion of cool aid for sure. There is that little detail that glossy screens needed absolutely perfect conditions in front of them to not reflect literally whole world, making resulting visuals often subpar to matte. I have never, ever been in work conditions in past 20 years that didn't manifest this in annoying and distracting way.

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.

They are really good at selling a small quantitative improvement that causes them to start using something, as a new type of thing going from impossible to possible. As if the tech didn’t just didn’t exist before Apple started using it.

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.

> It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option

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.

Do you prefer glossy paper work? glossy book pages? glossy construction documents? The preference for a non-reflective surface for the relaying of dense information has been established for decades.

You know what's glossy? Movie posters and postcards.

> What exactly are they "engineering" here?

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.

non-reflective surfaces you cite have pigments on TOP. screens have depth causing parallax and light spreading. Your point would be valid if screens were paper-thin and image pixels came out the very surface

The "matte" options also are totally different approaches, different quality levels. They're not the same product.

Paper, books, and construction documents all use reflected and not refracted light.

Apple was actually late to the glossy display party. HP and Dell moved to them a few years before Apple. I don't think Apple was "insisting" on them, but rather following an industry trend that they were late to.

> High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight,

I guess Apple cheaped out on their glossy displays, because I definitely didn't care for mine in full daylight

> They simply eliminated the matte option without comment, and finally brought it back many years later.

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.

Glossy vs matte has started to matter less as the peak brightness goes up.

When your screen can do 1,600 nits, daylight isn't as much of a problem

I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable. Maybe you'd notice it in lab setting but not irl. Kind of like 120hz and 4k; just useless to most peoples eyes at the distances people actually use these devices. I've only owned matte external monitors as well and again, no issues there.

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.

i recently worked with a macbook pro and it caused uncomfortable feelings of eyestrain. i had some app that was supposed to disable the temporal dithering but i'm not sure if it helped. i'm curious if there's anyone else on here like me who has experienced eyestrain with macbooks where the nano texture display has helped.

The PowerBook and the first MacBook Pro were only matte.

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.

Yeah this m3 pro isn't really doing 1600 nits. Marginally brighter than my 2012.

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.

You'd need a jewelers loupe to appreciate parallax and spreading. Not a real problem in general use.

To each their own but I have a matte M4 Pro and I don't like it, and the screen is noticeably worse than my glossy M2 Pro.

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.

i use a matte screen protector on my iphone. without it, i can see pixels. with it, i cannot. no loupe, just my nearsighted eyes

I use Lunar and have used it on my Pro Display XDR and every MBP with XDR I've owned with 0 issues.

120Hz is absolutely a noticeable improvement over 60Hz. I have a 60Hz iPhone and a 120Hz iPhone and the 60Hz one is just annoying to use. Everything feels so choppy.

You make it sound like what they, according to you, tried to do was a success. One look at nano texture screen is enough for a resounding no.

>I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable.

They were absolutely noticable. Contrast was crap. I immediately went with glossy with my next MBP around that same period.

4K too, at anything over 15” or so.

I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.

Downvoted for the unhelpful first sentence.

You can see actual pixels on a retina iphone? That is remarkable eyesight. I could do it on old non retina iphones but not on retina models.

I can't tell at all when my mbp is in 120hz or 60hz. I tried to set up a good test too by scrolling really fast while plugging and unplugging the power adapter (which kicks it into high power 120hz or low power 60hz).

At the distance I look at my TV screen (about 7 feet from the couch) I can't make out the pixels of the 1080p screen. 4k is lost on me. 2020 vision but I guess that is not enough.

I’m 3m from my TV and I can absolutely tell 4K from 1080p, but it is indeed subtle.

But a fraction of that distance to my monitor makes even 4K barely good enough. I’d need a much smaller 4K monitor to not notice pixels.

We have different eyes and different purposes, I think.

> High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight…

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.

> Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections

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.

MagSafe + SD card reader + headphone jack + USB-C/TB4 only ports is fine by me. In 2025, I'm well past needing USB-C to USB-A dongles. We've had since what 2015/16 to start the conversion to C only.

Unless the screen is right in front of your face, video codecs and their parameters matter more than FHD vs UHD, IMO.

At least to me, with corrected vision, a high quality 1080p video looks better than streaming quality 4k at the same distance.

I'd rather not blow my battery budget on fighting the sun for visibility.

Both 4k and 120hz were very noticeable improvements imo.

All of what you say is kind of sort of true in the sense that, if you are in a room with lots of off-axis light hitting your screen and darkness behind you and you yourself are not brightly lit, then the glossy screen is better. And the glossy screen is certainly sharper.

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.

I agree with this, but I use a 43" 4K TV as my monitor... which probably isn't what you meant.

Compare apples to apples, e.g. gaming, and the difference is glaring.

I notice it on my 27” monitor. I’ve seen 15” 4K displays and that’s about the limit where I can see the difference.

My eyesight isn’t perfect, either.

It's certainly on brand for Apple to face widespread criticism in the past for having matte screens as the default (computer magazines of the day found that matte finishes made screens too dim) only to face renewed criticism for dropping the thing they were previously criticized for.

One of those things that some people notice, some people don't. I'm definitely in the camp where I feel differences between 120hz and 60hz, but I don't feel 60hz as choppy, and beyond 120hz I can't notice any difference, but others seemingly can. Maybe it's our biology?

Resolution is much less important for video than it is for text and user interfaces.

Kind of a cool thing about being nearsighted. Without glasses, I can get very close to things and still focus on them, i get to see very small details.

To each their own. Matte screens always have a massive smudge in bright light and look terrible and grainy in the dark. I can’t stand them.

I would bet most people would fail a blind test.

ooh, my feathers were a bit ruffled (for reasons unrelated) when I wrote the above.

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..

The 2006 would probably have had 1080ish resolution. I think the GP's point is that at higher resolutions, matte has tended to have the issues they cited.

I am with you in preferring matte. For me, mostly because of reflections on glossy screens.

Even at ~100 dpi, the grainy character of matte coatings from that era was noticeable; my 2006 iMac and a Dell Ultrasharp from a few years later were both unmistakably grainy in a way that glossy displays are not. At the time, the matte coatings were an acceptable tradeoff and the best overall choice for many users and usage scenarios. But I can imagine they would have been quite problematic when we jumped to 200+ dpi.

These AI comments suck. I mean sure. It’s probably true. But the pollution of our social interactions with slop is so icky.

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.

Basically everyone who has played videogames on pc will notice the difference. I easily notice a drop from 360Hz to 240Hz.

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 have a feeling that you've never actually seen a matte screen.

Videogames also do the input every loop so there's a big difference there. It must be evaluated with a video only.

If anything, Apple was right back then. Glossy has so many benefits for the places where you’d use a computer, it’s not even close. Having the option to pay premium for those few that work in environments where matte helps them makes sense. I’d pay money for my display to not be matte.

I tend to do outdoor things outdoors, so occasionally cranking up brightness is not an issue.

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.

We're talking about monitors here, which usually have a mouse cursor on it for input. Of course it would be hard to tell between 60 vs 120Hz screens if you used both to play a 30FPS video.

I think it’s more noticeable if you are touch interacting with your screen during a drag. If you are scrolling using the mouse, you might not realize it at all like if you were scrolling with your finger.

That's what Lunar is for. Just bump up the brightness to HDR levels. Helps a lot with the glare, but will take a bite out of the battery life.

It became more of an issue when retina came out, that's when they stopped non-reflective screen options.

> “…featuring the Intel Core Duo processor and a gorgeous new 13-inch glossy widescreen display…”

> “…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...

I still have my 2011 17" MacBook Pro, built to order with pretty much every available option available at the time, including the matte screen.

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.

It is well written and that makes you think it was written by AI? AI doesn't write as well as that anyway.

I can't go back to the low contrast and washed-out look of matte screens unfortunately. The nano texture isn't terrible but I'd only use it if I had to work with a bright window or other lighting source behind me. If you go to an Apple store you can A/B test glossy vs. nano-texture and glossy wins for me.

OLED glossy on the iPad Pro is even better.

In one quote they used glossy to describe it. How does that mean they said that glossiness made it better?

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.

If all that is true, why do professional photography monitors pretty much exclusively have matte finishes. Same for monitor used by video, CAD or 3d professionals.

You guys need to stop reading apple advertisement material and take it for gospel just because it has some fancy scientific words in it.

Matte is always being the fancier option in Photography paper, glossy photograph just looks cheap.

Hi! I don't think I have any way of convincing you, but I'm not an AI. Also, randomly accusing people of being an AI is fairly offensive, in case that's not obvious.

The difference between matte and glossy displays in regards to their contrast and clarity is absolutely noticeable to the naked eye.

Good for you! Not as good for a typical office though.

Is there any write up on the tech behind nano texture? What makes them better than traditional matte screens?

My car from 2023 still came with USB-A port. No-so cheap USB camera that I recently bought came with USB-A port.

Interesting, given that in the older days of analog dark room development, you had to use a special kind of paper and heat-press it against a polished surface when drying to get a glossy photo.

I always thought matte photos were more readable, but glossy used to be more wow and have “deeper blacks”.

I believe refresh rate/FPS is one of those things where it doesn't really matter but human eyes get spoiled by the higher standard, making it hard to go back. I never saw issues with 30 FPS until going to 60, etc. Hopefully I never get a glimpse of 120 or 144Hz, which would require me to throw out all existing devices.

This is exactly why I went to 4K.

Used to have a 27" 2560x1440 monitor at home. Got a 4K 27" at work, and when I got home, the difference was big enough that I (eventually) decided to upgrade the home monitor.

Best take in this thread.

The jump forward doesn't even necessarily feel that huge but the step backward is (annoyingly) noticeable.

For professional graphic designers, cinematographers, photographers, and illustrators these subtleties in the screen is a big deal.

I also have perfect vision in terms of focal length - but it turns out I have astigmatism in opposite axises in both eyes.

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.

It's super easy, put your finger on a touchpad and move it fast in circle so that the cursor also moves in circle. As the eye is not that fast, you will see multiple faint mouse cursors images. With 120 Hz there will be twice more cursors than with 60 Hz.

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.

It's indisputable that glossy displays have advantages over matte displays. It's also indisputable that matte displays have advantages over glossy displays, most importantly, fewer reflections of ambient light. The choice is a tradeoff.

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?

You could replicate a "perfect display" by analytically implementing motion blurring (which is really just a kind of temporal anti-aliasing) in software. This wouldn't let you track moving objects across the screen without blur, but that's a very niche scenario anyway. Where 120hz really helps you is in slashing total latency from user input to the screen. A 60hz screen adds a max 16.667ms of latency, which is plenty enough to be perceived by the user.

I don't think this is exactly accurate. The matte was a ~$80 upgrade option after they released the glossy. I definitely preferred the matte screens and still do. For coding reducing glare in uncontrolled environments is way more important to me than color fidelity, but to each their own.

Your 2006 MacBook was pre-retina, a.k.a. High-resolution, displays though. Any kind of smearing effect probably improved the perception of the image because it masked the very visible pixels in the LCD

I'm not convinced. I have an iphone 14 pro which has a 120 Hz screen. I can absolutely see the difference when scrolling compared to my older iphone 11 or computer screens.

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.

I have a 2013 MBP retina with glossy screen and a 2020 HP with a matte screen.

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.

Just make sure to not wear glasses or white clothes.

I also was matte in 06, and had that machine for 9 years (until it was stolen :/). Only option was glossy for my replacement, I was devastated. A few machines later now, I can’t imagine going back.

I have the last gen 27” 5k iMac with nano texture as my primary monitor these days and you can immediately tell the difference between image quality, compared to a glossy MacBook pro. Don’t get me wrong, it’s by far the best quality matte finish I’ve ever seen and I would buy it again, because it works great in a room with south-facing windows, but it definitely affects the overall image quality noticeably.

Yeah, what on earth. Go back to one of these old displays, I guarantee you want to gouge your eyes out at how terrible they are. 2006 should put you firmly in 720p land.

60 to 120? Generally there are tell tale signs. If I quickly drag a window around it’s clear as day at 120.

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.

The camera came with a USB-A port, or simply provided a cable that had a USB-A end? I've never seen a camera with an A port

Well, I WFH, so of course. Yet another reason RTO is a no go

Lots of games don't do input on every loop. Starcraft 2 has 24 hz input.

There is a large visual difference between 60hz/120-144hz.

It was a cable with USB-A end. The cable cannot be detached from the camera.

Display quality should be measured in eye-strain and fatigue after your intended workload.

Quality of life adjustments are all like this.

Especially wellness.

Color distortion and/or glare not worth marginal gains that cheap displays rely on the gloss for.