The history of the point [1] is equally interesting and messy. Back in school, my old teachers (mostly old printing machine operators, and typesetters) preferred Apple over anything else especially because of the native 72ppi vs windows normal 96ppi.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)

And these days, 96 ppi is the de facto standard, via the CSS specification:

https://webplatform.github.io/docs/tutorials/understanding-c...

It's as if the Windows spec were retconned into being the historical norm all along, but I need to dig around to find the origin story here... Why 96 dpi?

My simple guess is that 96 is also divisible by 12, and thus easy to split up into 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 18, 24 parts... you also have eight pieces in 72 for every nine pieces in 96.

  72 = 8  x 9 = 2^3 * 3^2
  96 = 32 x 3 = 2^5 * 3

Huh. Never really realized that...

The wiki has this paragraph:

In 1996, it was adopted by W3C for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) where it was later related at a fixed 3:4 ratio to the pixel due to a general (but wrong) assumption of 96 pixel-per-inch screens

I actually never really questioned this.

Some Macbooks don't match 218 ppi. MacBook Pro 14" and 16" have 254 ppi. I don't know why Apple decided to have such a high ppi for them.

So close... The display with the smallest pixels in my collection has been the quirky Essential PH-1; its display is a silly 504 ppi. I loved that thing, but the device is no longer supported by official updates.

It looks mighty nice, just 4 ppi short of exactly 2x pixels per linear inch of these new Macs. I have no idea why.