Many confuse hardware differences (low-DPI versus high-DPI screens) with operating system differences.

Windows has had sub-pixel text alignment and LCD-oriented anti-aliasing ("ClearType") for, what, a decade? Text on my 267-DPI Surface Book looks absolutely amazing, and obviously text on a 226-DPI Macbook will look great as well.

For those who are not confused by hardware differences, I suspect the remaining matters are taste and familiarity. Having used Windows for a long time, my preference is for Windows' rendering and I find the rendering on macOS to be odd and uncomfortable. I'm struggling to find the right adjective—perhaps too comical or whimsical? Overall font selections and rendering don't seem as crisp and professional as on Windows.

Windows also supports ligatures and advanced kerning, so text on a web browser with good Windows API support (e.g., Edge or Firefox) looks fantastic. (Chrome was a notable laggard here, refusing to use modern Windows text rendering APIs for a very long time.)

It's mainly true on low DPI screens at 1:1 scaling with small point sized fonts. At a certain size, all fonts basically look alike in that case. It does happen on high dpi screens at 1:1 scaling too, but you need a magnifying glass to see the issues.

There's an app called MacType which makes the rendering more like Mac on low DPI screens, but I don't think it gets updated very often.

I am no professional in typography nor have I used any other Mac than the Macbook 12" (2015), but putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen), I still like macOS' text rendering a lot more.

Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text.

Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes.

However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?

Higher pixel density makes a huge difference in text quality, of course. Your MacBook has 226 pixels per inch, and the Acer Predator Z35 has a very low 79 pixels per inch - that's almost a 3:1 difference linearly, and more than 8:1 by area.

On other words, given the same physical text size on each monitor, your MacBook is using more than eight times the number of pixels to render each character.

Given a choice between macOS on a 226 PPI monitor and any other OS on a 79 PPI monitor, I would definitely prefer macOS too. :-)

You're right that the best way to compare font rendering is on the same monitor for each OS. I wouldn't use 27" FHD monitors though. Those would have 81 PPI, about the same as the Predator.

In my case I'm comparing OSX and Windows on the same hardware: the MBPR 15" (220 PPI) plus a ViewSonic VX2475SMHL-4K 24" 4K monitor (187 PPI) rotated to portrait mode. I'm a big fan of smaller high-DPI monitors like this. 187 PPI is a reasonably close match to the MBPR's 220 PPI. Both Mac and Windows look nice on each of these displays, I just find I like Windows better of the two.

Here's a spreadsheet I've been maintaining that lists the pixels per inch for a variety of machines and monitors:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K4bCgr-VjMmeCjHf6Udy...

>> putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen)

The reason why you notice the difference is because of the low DPI for the screen size on your Z35. Windows fonts render badly on those screens at small point sizes. If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.

> If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.

Oh, I'm sure of it. Thing is though, I picked the Z35 and not the Z34 because I also want to game on the machine and going to [almost] 4K was a no-go, even with a GTX 980.

I suppose one day I might just switch to huge dual-monitor setup: one for gaming and one for everything else. Seems like quite a hassle though, having in mind that my Z35 occupies a huge chunk of my otherwise pretty big desk.

I have 2 x 27" 4K screens side by side (at 1:1 text scaling - yes, I'm crazy, but it's for work so the tradeoffs were worth it for me).

You can still play your games at 1080p on a 4K screen - the pixels divide up evenly by 4, so I don't think it would look any worse than playing on a native 1080p panel of the same size.

If you really, really want mac style text rendering on your monitor, check out an app called MacType. The text will look much closer to how Mac renders fonts.

I'll definitely try MacType. Seen your other posts about it. Thanks.