I agree completely. Even on a HiDPI screen, I couldn’t believe how bad Avenir and other great fonts looked in a Windows and Linux browser. Although, the Retina display may be spoiling me, I checked some work on an older 27” iMac, non retina, and it looked pretty bad also.
My reference is a non-Retina MacBook Air and external displays that are around 100 DPI - I still live in a non-Retina world and the difference is still glaring.
Re:The Decline of the MacBook Pro
by tonyedgecombe on Friday June 08, 2018 @01:29PM
(#17267737)
I think it's more noticeable on non-Retina, I guess there is more anti-aliasing going on.
That's an interesting comment. I bought my first MBP in mid-2012 (and, it's my current mac, although I just dropped it and cracked the LCD screen, so this discussion is suddenly very relevant to me) and I found, especially when outputting to a 1080p monitor, that I hated the way text looked on the Mac. I think this was one of my biggest complaints. Either it's gotten better over the years, or I've gotten used to it, because I don't notice it anymore.
Have you tried out what it looks like on Windows 10 with a high resolution display properly set to zooming like 200%? I think that Windows has made a lot of progress on this in the last few years.
This might be highly subjective but for me the same font on a Mac looks much more pleasant than on Windows or Ubuntu. It is tempting to understate this as a minor detail but for me text is one of the most important parts of the user interface and I can't understand how the other platforms could neglect their font rendering this much.