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.
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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.
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.
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.
They were absolutely noticable. Contrast was crap. I immediately went with glossy with my next MBP around that same period.
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.
I am with you in preferring matte. For me, mostly because of reflections on glossy screens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.