In my experience pixel doubling match doesn’t really matter when you’re downscaling from a high-dpi to low-dpi monitor (as opposed to low-dpi to even lower-dpi). The resolution is so high to begin with it’s no longer noticeable (except on text if you look very closely).
oh I meant “making 1080p graphics look as sharp as they would on a native 1080p display, as it’s an exact multiple thereof” but I probably used the wrong term
Yes, I understood, I’m saying it looks crisp anyway even without an exact match when you’re downscaling from 4k. There may as well be infinite pixels when you go that high.
My Samsung Galaxy S8+ shipped from the factory with a permanent downscale from the native 2960x1440 to 2200x1080, to save battery on the GPU I presume. In theory, this is awful; in practice everything still looks extremely sharp.
EDIT: Anyway, for the particular monitor I got, I just checked and its resolution is an exact double of 1080p.
yeah, the nice thing about 4k is that it’s a direct multiple of both 720p and 1080p
some monitors manage to still fuck up that scaling though
this is the worst samsung shit I have ever heard and I cannot accept that it’s at all OK
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Apple did the exact same thing for one generation of phone (I forget what it’s called – it was when they caved and bumped their screen size for the first time)
Also, it’s not truly permanent in the sense that you can go in the settings and bump it back to native. I just mean permanent unless you do that (e.g. no game developer can do that for you just for their one app). I did try out the native resolution, and couldn’t tell any difference, so I bumped it back down.
Even if I had the money, I wouldn’t want to drop more than TCL-level $ on an HDR display until there’s support for 4:4:4 10-bit color at 60+hz. Buying an HDR display now kinda feels like getting a 720p display in the early HD days.
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It was for the iPhone 6+ (which was their third screen-size bump (4->5; 5->6; 6->6+)). It sticks in my mind as marking the nadir of Apple’s software quality and product design in its contemporary era.
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Nah, the nadir was the iPhone 5C. (Like the 6+, an attempt to imitate the competition)
I still like to describe ugly plastic things as “unapologetically plastic” to this day
unapologetically plastic:
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The 5C is an inarguable design classic, last gasp of their full-on mod glory.
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you know what, I will even replace my laptop with an iPad at this point if they improve the external display support next week. fuck it.
lol
that’s the only major pain point for switching at this point; I can do most development through Coda with a server running Dropbox and a heavily configured vim (ironically being very familiar with Linux makes using an iPad professionally in place of a Mac easier) and when I need to build something in XCode I can just grab someone else’s machine. Intel’s roadmaps are terrible and my moonlight setup works well enough and creative cloud is all there now and the keyboard does regular task switching shortcuts these days and it has a tiling window manager!
“thin” client amirite
Which raises the question of if you aren’t going to use your laptop/tablet’s CPU for anything, why do you care whether it’s Intel or ARM
it still gets used burstily and I’d rather it be as efficient as possible given that
Anyway, a polished version of features like mouse support, external display, copy-paste and keyboard shortcuts is actually really hard to deliver. We take it for granted on the legacy OSes because they’ve had decades to evolve it, but just like Samsung DeX is garbage, an iPad used docked can’t possibly be good yet either.
I’ve actually tried Samsung DeX by the way. There’s so many details in desktop UI to get wrong it’s amazing. They really tried, but it’s not really doable from that base in that timeframe.
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well they definitely have the right take on window management, but I agree that external displays are still a blocker and pointing device support follows from that…
but I’m also fully willing to be humoured by doubling down on keyboard shortcuts
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Like the one feature where you can move around the external display edges relative to each other
And putting the dock on only one display
And graying out all kinds of stuff on the unused display
And (this is actually the absolute worst) when a window is halfway across two displays with different DPI scaling factors (maybe the tiling helps avoid this in the first place tho)
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this is an explosive take, a real bombshell
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