Glossy displays are cheaper to make (since they lack the anti-glare coating).
Most consumers even prefer glossy vs matte (especially when they see them side to side at the shop) because the matte coating (obviously) reduces brightness and colors are perceived as less vibrant. Of course, as soon as you have to work with them (apart from viewing a movie in a dark room) you'll regret it.
Cheaper + clueless consumer = market trend.
The previous generation of MBP had both options. I bought the matte, and the price (IIRC) was the same.
I believe that Apple didn't offer this option for these models from the beginning because the screen of unibody machines has glass in front of it and so the process to add the coating wasn't ready yet or it was much more costly.
When you order the matte option, the whole glass panel and bezel are removed and replaced with an aluminum frame like the earlier models. It is not merely a coating applied to the glass, it's a different part entirely.
One thing I like of the glass screen is that it is probably easier to clean and in general more durable (except if you drop it on the floor, of course).
It's interesting that a lot of people feel that glossy screens look better in the showroom. When I'm in an Apple Store or a Best Buy or wherever, the overhead lighting is often so bright that all you can see on glossy laptop screens is glare and reflection. It's exactly because of this showroom experience that I've always avoided glossy laptop screens.
Yes there is probably a name for the affect of things like gloss, or brightness in a shop causing increated sales (yet its actually an inferior feature). Its the same reason LCDs have brightness and colour cranked up in shops, stereos are played loud etc...
Having said that, the glass on the unibody does look easy to keep clean.
It's odd, though - in some European countries, the glossy screens are considered ergonomically harmful and are therefore banned from the workplace. So you can't give your employees iMacs, smaller Macbooks, etc. to work on. You'd think Apple would be a bit keener to sell to businesses.
Apple traditionally hasn't sold to businesses due to Big Corporations apparent desire to quash anything capable of spurring original thought in its workers.
Business is packed full of contradictions from rules they've created for themselves, like using uniforms and team building exercises to help the workers feel part of a group, but positively crap themselves at the idea of their workers unionising due to feeling like part of a group.
Consumers on the other hand are relatively simple, give them something bright and shiny and they love it. Essentially we shop like Magpies, people frequently buy the wrong product for themselves because it's the better advertised and branded product.
Sure, maybe not large corporations, but a lot of small businesses use macs, and on the desktop, you currently only have the choice between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, which is definitely suboptimal.
It's based on the European council's guideline 90/270/EWG. As far as I can tell, it's up to the countries to implement corresponding laws, and at least Germany and Austria have such laws.
Ah, OK. Interestingly, I just checked the UK regulations for this and they define the positioning of the light sources, not the qualities of the screen:
Possible disturbing glare and reflections on the screen or other equipment shall be prevented by co-ordinating workplace and workstation layout with the positioning and technical characteristics of the artificial light sources.
Nonsense. You have it backwards. Matte screens really require the ideal lighting conditions.
Easy test: take one of each, and go outside.
Sunlight washes out a matte screen to the point of being impossible to use.
Glossy screens reflect much of that light away, leaving the screen still legible.
As someone that used to do a lot of work outdoors on a laptop, there's no comparison. Glossy screens are usable in FAR, FAR more varied lighting conditions. Too much direct light and a matte screen becomes completely useless.
This hasn't been my experience at all. My previous lappy had a glossy screen, and I simply couldn't use it outside, and it's one of the reasons I didn't buy an Apple laptop when I got a new one a couple of months ago (bought a Dell Latitude with a super bright matte screen that works great indoors and out).
I think saying, "Glossy screens reflect much of that light away, leaving the screen still legible" is magical thinking. The reflected light goes into your eye, just like the light that's coming from the screen.
A sufficiently bright glossy screen and placing the lappy out of direct sunlight could overcome this problem, but I'm pretty darned sure matte screens work better than shiny ones outdoors.
If by "magic thinking", you mean "a basic understanding of concepts like angle of incidence/reflection", then sure, magic. Or basic science. Your choice.
Don't go by sketchy memory. Take one of each laptop - borrow a co-worker's, if necessary - go outside, and expose each screen to direct sunlight.
Observe how the matte screen diffuses the light across the entire screen surface.
Also observe how glossy screens (which, it turns out, don't come in parabola shapes, and as such aren't reflecting all incoming light to one point) aren't washed out like the matte. There's glare, of course, but you'll quickly see the difference.
Given sufficiently bright direct light, matte glare is MURDER compared to reflective glare. Matte is ideal for office settings, but far inferior in sunlight.
If by "magic thinking", you mean "a basic understanding of concepts like angle of incidence/reflection", then sure, magic. Or basic science. Your choice.
No. Not choice. Evidence says you're wrong. Evidence trumps theory. Them's the rules of science.
Don't go by sketchy memory. Take one of each laptop - borrow a co-worker's, if necessary - go outside, and expose each screen to direct sunlight.
This isn't sketchy memory I'm talking about here. I still own the glossy screen laptop, and I also have a new Mini 9 with a glossy screen, and both can be cranked up nice and bright. I know they're unusable outdoors. And I know that my new laptop is quite usable outdoors even in low-power (dim screen) mode. I just took them all outside for a side-by-side. I mostly see my face and shirt in the glossy lappies, while the matte screen is quite usable.
Neither type of screen is great in direct sunlight, of course, but the matte screen can actually be used even in direct sunlight. The glossy screens cannot. At least not by me...maybe my eyes are worse than most (actually that's not a maybe, I'm damned near legally blind without glasses or contacts).
Anyway, as I mentioned, sufficient brightness can somewhat overcome the problems of glossy screens outdoors. Newer laptops are brighter than older ones, so if you upgraded from a matte screen from a few years back to a newer Apple laptop with a much brighter glossy screen, you might feel like the newer screen is more usable even in sunlight.
But, I'm absolutely certain a good matte screen is better for working outdoors than a good glossy screen.
The good news for you and your glossy screen preference is that since glossy screens are cheaper to manufacture, they are far more common. You will be able to buy glossy screens to your hearts content. I, on the other hand, have to be a bit more selective, and usually spend a bit more (generally only the high end Dell models have the matte option).
So in scenarios where you have direct sunlight shining on your screen, glossy is better.
On the other hand a glossy screen is a mirror and distracting compared to a matte screen in all other cases.
I've never been in a situation where I couldn't prevent direct sunlight from hitting my screen. I am in conditions all the time where reflections would distract me and I cannot orient the screen to fix it. This doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
That's not my experience, either. I just got a new laptop and chose a matte screen because my previous glossy screen was impossible to use on the train as any bit of sun turned the display into a mirror. The matte screen is much, much better.
Easy test if you somehow have two macbook pros sitting around... including one that has a matte screen which apparently just became available again today.
The glossy displays on the MacBook pros are actually not that bad. They ramp up to such a high brightness that you can defeat any glare you throw at it.
I've used my macbook pro in the full midday sun on my back with no problem. The matte screen on my 15" powerbook was pretty much unusable outside unless it was dark.
I think this is likely more due to the change to LED for back lighting.
What the problem is with glossy displays is that they act like a half-silvered piece of glass. If the brightness on the outside gets too high, they turn into a mirror and it's near impossible to see through. However if the brightness remains high on the inside, you can see through with perfect clarity.
So long as the back lighting can get brighter than the fore lighting, the glossy screen can be amazing. It has a few problems, like glares (where reflections and such cause light levels to peak higher than the back light), however these are really only a problem if you have to max out your back light.
Apple should be designing their laptop screens like they do their iPod screens. My brightness on my iPod is set to ~0% and inside it is perfect, even for most tv shows (no dark moody movies though), and outside I rarely need to put it up to 100% on the sunniest of days. This would be the ideal, but until laptops actually become ultra-portable I don't think this is a huge concern.
I think it's a trend of the new-geek to want to be outside in nature when working, so hopefully some ultra-powerful back lights are going to be available on high-end laptops for use outside.
It seems better, but I'm pretty sure it's an illusion that comes at a cost of color accuracy. The glossy screen reflects more light before it hits the actual display, reducing the amount of light needed to be absorbed to give a true black, and also causing the color-matching issues described in the article.
I don't like how the two laptops they're using as examples in the photo at the bottom have different desktop backgrounds and screen contents. They could have at least cleared the desktop and used the same wallpaper.
It's interesting how responsive Apple is to customer feedback. A lot of times, customers complain about Apple's new product leaving out some feature, and then the next revision magically incorporates that feature (a good example would be Firewire on the 13-inch macbooks).
They aren't at all vocal about this, so people see Apple as being super closed, but I think that they do care a lot about what customers think. They design products that people want for a reason. Sure it involves thinking outside the box and offering products that people never imagined asking for. But it also requires listening to customers' opinions and integrating that into future product revisions.
They wouldn't have needed to bring back matte displays have they listened to their users and not removed this option in the first place.
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I don't know why they fanatically remove useful features and options. It's 2009, and I can't even choose a _custom_ color to serve as a wallpaper for Mac OS X, only one of _ten_ colors provided by Apple. It's so unimaginably idiotic to have to create a png file for this purpose.
Its usefulness is comparable to time and effort required to implement it. Surely there are other, more useful yet still ignored features, like being able to set larger font size in Mac OS.
it's in a post above, but they "removed" this option from their newly designed laptops because it requires an entirely different screen construction. i also don't think the majority of users want matte screens, even if many do.
I wish they would offer some decent resolutions as well...the 13" with 1400x900 would be nice (like on a lenovo X301), and 15" with 1920x1050 (like you can get on a dell xps 1550) would be so good! Who wants to lug a 17" lump around to get decent res?
Same here. I'm looking to replace my aging Dell Inspiron 8600, which is a 15.4" display with 1920x1200 matte finish display. A 15" Mac Book Pro is very tempting but I too wish they would offer a higher dot pitch. But my eyes are older and find myself increasing the font size in code as the day wears on. The alternate is to connect to a large desktop display when available.
Not having the option to be able to go to an insane dot pitch on the Mac Book Pro is helping to keep my wallet shut.
Screen resolution increases are blocking on resolution-independent UI. Apple's been actively working on it for quite a while now, and the next OS release changes the UI target gamma, and will need mostly redrawn graphics, so we can only hope that real resolution independence isn't too far away.
I think the standard widescreen aspect for the 15" would be 1680x1050. I'm holding off my MBP purchase for that. My current 14" dell has 1440x900, I can't understand why the "better" screens on the MBP's have such poor resolution.
Tradition. Apple laptop screens have always been subpar. Worse panels, worse lighting, worse resolution than what you'd get in a similarly priced PC laptop.
I guess this has to do with the screen being one of the most expensive parts and apple selling smaller quantities than other manufacturers. Better panels would likely eat into their margin significantly.
Anyways Apple is not dumb and has long realized that this flaw can be trivially concealed simply by ensuring that your product is never on display side-by-side with competing brands.
The glossy screens are certainly nicer for watching crisp video. I wish I had gotten the matte screen as I don't watch much on my computer. (Glossy certainly looks better in the showroom)
I did buy a screen protector at the Mac Store for my iTouch which mimics a matte finish on top of the glossy screen. If I were to buy the upcoming larger-screen iTouch tablet I would highly recommend getting a matte finish to cut down on glare & fingerprints, etc.
Actually I don't like video on my MacBooks glossy screen. The reason is that dark backgrounds make the reflection much more noticeable. While I work, I tend to have a lot of white in the background, and it is very usable. Videos tend to have a lot of dark scenes, so the reflections get very annoying.
I use my laptop mostly indoors in my home office with controlled lighting. The glossy screen looks better, deeper blacks, more vibrant colors, etc... While I wouldn't use it for photo or pre-press work, I really like it in general.
But isn't the point of a laptop portability? The glossy screen makes it significantly less portable -- in anything but ideal lighting, everything in front of the screen is reflected in a way that interferes with the intended image. That just doesn't sound conducive to usefulness in a laptop.
If you just use it inside your home office, why buy a laptop in the first place?
I said "mostly". I also use it in my dining room, my media room, out on my back deck, in my yard, at the local coffee shop, on planes (way too much), at client sites, in hotels, at friends houses, at my mom's house, in the car, and so on.
The only time glare has been a significant problem is when I'm outside (at my house or a coffee shop) and the sun is in the wrong position (solved this on my deck with a patio umbrella). For what it's worth, the same conditions where the glare is bad tend to make my previous matte 15" mbp totally unusable (washed out).
Again, I don't do photo work, but for e-mail, coding, etc... it takes a lot for the glare to get to the point where it interferes, and the matte screen is usually useless long before then.
It can be hard to use a desktop sitting on the couch in your home office. The laptop takes up a lot less room when your home office is also your entertainment room.
If glare is coming from one direction, glossy can be good or terrible depending on where you point it. Matte is just always equally bad, and turning the brightness up is all you can do.
Even for something as trivial as this, this is just one of those weird cases where you look around at the world, and want to yell, "what the hell is wrong with you people"?
I don't understand why anyone would own a glossy screen.
Even for something as trivial as this, this is just one of those weird cases where you look around at the world, and wonder "Why are you compelled to post that you don't understand something?"
People are making, selling, designing, buying owning glossy screens. This means your mental model is way out of alignment with reality.
But that's not a problem, there are several explanations in the comments on this very page which you can read and then you will understand why people own glossy screens.
1) That was the only option if you wanted a new MacBook Pro.
2) Even now, it's the cheaper option to purchase.
2) They make blacks look blacker and screens look shinier, which is (subjectively) desirable.
3) Because of this, they're (subjectively) nicer for looking at pictures and movies on.
4) Under many use scenarios, there are no downsides because it's pretty easy to position it so there's no glare.
5) There is no ugly bezel around the edge of the screen as there is for the matte screens so it (subjectively) looks nicer.
6) It's the sort of small thing that can be easily overlooked, or not noticed if ordering online, and someone could end up buying one without knowing in advance that the glare would annoy them, then ignoring it as a minor inconvenience.
That's one way to look at it. Another way would be that lower production volume for matte screens means higher per unit cost, so they have to make up for this with the additional $50.
Maybe. However, before Apple removed the matte option I have never seen a glossy screen on an apple laptop (except in their stores). Sample size is not that big, though.
They might have been reluctant to bring back the matte, so they tried to see if they could make $50 off of each one, and it sure did. I wonder what's next, take out the "space" key on the keyboard and charge $10 for it?
