AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks

Re:AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks by ben-schaaf on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:11PM (#27017420)

> That’s why they’ve excelled in font rendering

Not sure about the past, but without subpixel antialiasing they pretty much have the worst font rendering now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks by matwood on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:54PM (#27017812)

Doesn’t this only cause issues on non-HiDPI screens.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks by owlboy on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:29PM (#27017586)

Can you elaborate?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks by rand_r on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:59PM (#27017868)

Basically, they assume you’re using a retina quality (aka HiDPI) display where each virtual or abstract pixel maps to four physical pixels in the display.

For example, you have a 27” 4K display, but set the resolution to 1920x1080 in System Preferences.

Mapping each virtual pixel to four physical pixels lets you render curves really crisply. However, on non-HiDPI where you don’t have pixel doubling, you have to use sub-pixel rendering to approximate curves.

One technique is playing with slightly shading adjacent pixels so that at a distance curves appear to be smoothed out. But for some technical reasons, Apple dropped support for sub-pixel rendering. It was too hard to do and the future is HiDPI anyway.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks by spicybright on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:50PM (#27017777)

Right? All it's missing is a Posted from my iPhone footer

[ Parent | on HN ]