Apple made External Monitors worse, then sold us retina displays
and somehow no one is talking about it.
Every YouTuber tells you that you need a 5K monitor to make macOS look sharp on an external display. No. You need one because Apple removed something that used to be in the system.
I’m honestly so tired of Apple’s approach to external monitors.
In 2018, with macOS Mojave, Apple removed subpixel antialiasing. That was the font smoothing technique that helped text and UI elements look sharper on regular lower PPI monitors.
Then, one year later, Apple released its own 6K display with extremely high pixel density, where everything suddenly looks sharp again.
Convenient timing, right?
Ever since then, macOS has basically looked great only on Retina or HiDPI displays.
Connect a Mac to a regular 1080p or 1440p monitor and the whole display can feel soft, blurry, thin, or just uncomfortable. Text is the most obvious part, but it affects the entire experience. The UI feels less crisp. Web pages look worse. Code looks worse. The same exact monitor can look perfectly fine on Windows, but on macOS it suddenly feels like it's trash.
Even many good 4K monitors still don’t look as crisp as a MacBook screen or a proper 5K display, because macOS is clearly designed around high PPI scaling now.
This is not just me being picky about pixels. People stare at external monitors all day for work. If the same monitor looks sharp on Windows but soft and tiring on macOS, that is a real usability and accessibility issue that can lead to eyestrain, headaches and fatigue.
Windows can make cheap monitors look decent. Apple basically says: buy an expensive high PPI display or deal with bad visual clarity.
Honestly, there should be a petition for Apple to bring back proper font smoothing options for external monitors, or at least to give users a system level toggle for subpixel antialiasing.
Why is a $2,000+ MacBook worse with normal monitors than my 150$ Windows laptop?
Apple, please fix external monitor rendering.
Our eyes matter.