A 1x monitor will be a cheap second monitor or something attached to a Mac Mini (please keep it alive Apple) or Mac Pro (one day it will come). From Apple's point of view I imagine all of these are just super small niches.
The software folks have a good reason to remove subpixel AA; it's a hack to get better horizontal spatial resolution out of cheap monitors. The users have no reason, however, to buy better, now reasonably-priced, displays that would make subpixel AA unnecessary.
By removing subpixel AA at a time when HiDPI monitors are cheap, Apple is probably doing us a service. In a few years, hopefully everyone will be on a DPI that can render nice text. You may think it's unnecessary, but consider complex glyphs like Hanzi and Kanji, which really don't get enough mileage out of subpixel AA really.
I know it's pretty irritating to suggest that forcing users to buy new hardware is doing them "a service." But really, I see no conflict of interest here. Apple themselves probably hasn't shipped a 96 DPI display in half a decade, and they don't even sell their own external displays, so they don't stand to gain that much here other than software performance.
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?
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.
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.
Do you have to upgrade the OS? Nope. It's a choice and a tradeoff.
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.
Please point to me a reasonably-priced HiDPI/Retina Ultrawide (at least 34" and 3440x1440 reso) monitor. I couldn't find one.
> Of course, I dont have answers
The questions were related to backing up what you claimed. You obviously could not do this.
Given how shoddy Win10's support for HiDPI is across applications at the moment (currently I have a choice between running my 4k laptop at full resolution and having a correctly-sized UI in all the applications I use), I seriously hope they don't do that.
Elementary level of product owner analysis I must say. Proactively constraint your product into a niche category.. tsk, tsk.
Yeah, it hasn't been working for Apple this past 2 decades. They're only near the $1 trillion mark, could have been way better...
Pretty sure this is what Alan Kay means when he says that people who are serious about software will make their own hardware.