> Unfortunately, people still choose to own monitors that have weird resolutions that do not approximate 96dpi after integer scaling.
It’s not always a choice unfortunately. I buy displays that are capable of a clean 1x or 2x when I can, but there’s a ton of laptops that still need fractional scaling.
Take my Thinkpad X1 Nano. Great laptop in a lot of ways, including the screen (~500 nits brightness, excellent backlight consistency, color, and contrast, no glare) except that it runs at a resolution that requires 1.5x scaling to be usable.
Looking at replacement candidate laptops, the only ones that have 2x screens that aren’t a downgrade somehow destroy battery life (e.g. 3000x2000 OLED panel in Dragonfly Elite G4, which docks 3-4h of battery). 1x screens in this category for some reason are all kinda crappy with e.g. dim 350 nit backlights that start to struggle in a moderately naturally well-lit room, which is just goofy in a portable machine that’s likely to get usage in a bright environment.
This is one thing that MacBooks objectively do consistently better.
It's not really as necessary on PCs because of how Windows does scaling. It's only a problem in programs that just straight up don't support it. And Apple has routinely and still does ship laptops with non-integer scaled resolutions as default (e.g., the 12" MacBook, the 13" Macbook Air).
It’s not always a choice unfortunately. I buy displays that are capable of a clean 1x or 2x when I can, but there’s a ton of laptops that still need fractional scaling.
Take my Thinkpad X1 Nano. Great laptop in a lot of ways, including the screen (~500 nits brightness, excellent backlight consistency, color, and contrast, no glare) except that it runs at a resolution that requires 1.5x scaling to be usable.
Looking at replacement candidate laptops, the only ones that have 2x screens that aren’t a downgrade somehow destroy battery life (e.g. 3000x2000 OLED panel in Dragonfly Elite G4, which docks 3-4h of battery). 1x screens in this category for some reason are all kinda crappy with e.g. dim 350 nit backlights that start to struggle in a moderately naturally well-lit room, which is just goofy in a portable machine that’s likely to get usage in a bright environment.
This is one thing that MacBooks objectively do consistently better.