> In a few years, hopefully everyone will be on a DPI that can render nice text.
My 1x monitor can render text just fine using sub-pixel AA. It's a proven technique that has been around for ages and the text looks great on it.
> consider complex glyphs like Hanzi and Kanji, which really don't get enough mileage out of subpixel AA really.
If I start to become a heavy user of Hanzi and Kanji then I will consider purchasing a monitor that displays it better, but currently not an issue.
> Apple is probably doing us a service.
Requiring me to spend money on new hardware in order to avoid a regression in my experience is somehow doing me a favour? Really?
> so they don't stand to gain that much here other than software performance.
I don't understand the performance argument people keep bringing up. Subpixel AA has been around for ages and worked fine on much older hardware. Why is it suddenly a bottleneck that needs to be removed when my decade old hardware can still do it?
>Requiring me to spend money on new hardware in order to avoid a regression in my experience is somehow doing me a favour? Really?
No, of course not. If you phrase it like that, that is, ignore the point of removing it entirely and all of the benefits that come with it, of course it's not beneficial.
However, 96 DPI was never ideal. HiDPI won't just avoid a regression, it'll improve your experience, period. And with this new software change, you'll get a performance improvement, from better caching and easier GPU acceleration, and software engineers can delete thousands of lines of potentially buggy code made to work around the interaction of subpixel rendering with other graphics code.
Like, subpixel rendering is easy to understand in theory and that might delude one into thinking that it's just a minor annoyance, but it's an annoyance that permeates the stack. You have to special case the entire stack wherever text is concerned. Effectively, the text is being rendered at 3x the horizontal resolution of everything else. This brings in complication across the board. An example is that you pretty much have to do the alpha blending in software, and when you do it requires knowledge of the final composition. Doing alpha blending in software sounds easy... But it's only easy if you do it wrong. Dealing with gamma for example. Which makes life worse because you already have to do this for the other part of your graphics library, probably with a case for both GPU acceleration and software.
Basically, you'd have to render the whole screen at 3x horizontal resolution to remove the need for all of these compositing hacks. Nobody does this because subpixel AA was a hack from the get go.
In an era where battery life and TDP are actually important, finite resources, we want to remove these hacks.
P.S.: if you've never tried rendering large amounts of text on screen before, I highly recommend you try writing a piece of software that needs to do this. A few years ago I struggled to get 60fps rendering text for an IRC client, and of course caching the glyphs was horrendously complex thanks to subpixel AA. It would've been easy if I could've just used GPU compositing like all other graphics, but instead I resorted to hacks everywhere. Maybe today's computers don't need the hacks, but it's worth noting that yes, rendering fonts is resource intensive - you're just living on top of decades of optimizations and hacks to make it look like it's easy.
> No, of course not. If you phrase it like that, that is
But that's what it is, that's not just clever phrasing on my part.
> HiDPI won't just avoid a regression, it'll improve your experience, period.
I get that, but if I wanted to spend money on that improvement I would do that. The point is my choice is no longer between maintaining my current standard or upgrading, its between regressing my current standard or upgrading.
Unless you want to selflessly support some botnet you have to update your OS pretty soon after it's released. Certainly more often than you have to upgrade your screen.
I'm not sure if this was sarcastic or not, but I'd have to say pretty well. I have a 2008 iMac that's stuck on El Cap, and it still gets OS and Safari security updates.
Well, I'm not, and neither is Apple, because we are not the common case. I, too, have my Thinkpad docked all the time, connected to two external monitors that are 96 DPI. That does not mean I do not support the move past 96 DPI, I absolutely do despite the extra cost, because I do have HiDPI setups and after having one I have little interest in putting any more money into low DPI equipment.
The cheapest HiDPI monitor I would even consider buying is $2000. There are no ultrawide HiDPI monitors in existence at the moment.
Of course HiDPI is a regression in some ways. You can get far better non-retina monitors (low latency, higher refresh rate, wider range of aspect ratios) at any price point.
My 1x monitor can render text just fine using sub-pixel AA. It's a proven technique that has been around for ages and the text looks great on it.
> consider complex glyphs like Hanzi and Kanji, which really don't get enough mileage out of subpixel AA really.
If I start to become a heavy user of Hanzi and Kanji then I will consider purchasing a monitor that displays it better, but currently not an issue.
> Apple is probably doing us a service.
Requiring me to spend money on new hardware in order to avoid a regression in my experience is somehow doing me a favour? Really?
> so they don't stand to gain that much here other than software performance.
I don't understand the performance argument people keep bringing up. Subpixel AA has been around for ages and worked fine on much older hardware. Why is it suddenly a bottleneck that needs to be removed when my decade old hardware can still do it?