I really don't see how they're much worse than the average in their industry for almost any of those. Mac Mini, Studio, and Pro all want an external monitor, and that's essentially the same product lines any other company would sell an external monitor on. With the iMac being a smaller part of the line, they're maybe even more in line with the rest of the competition on monitors.

I literally own a Framework. I care about this stuff in general, but it's not like they're making equal or worse products. What Apple is getting out of their M# processor lines is insane. Honestly, it's questionable if my modular laptop is better for the environment with how much more power I have to spend charging it vs. most of Apple's options, given that I've generally kept using my laptops for 5-7 years at least.

I've thrown away way more e-waste on my fully modular external monitor Windows/Linux desktop than I've thrown away Apple products over the years. Modular essentially means "throw away some of your parts regularly". What else am I supposed to do with a 6 year old CPU and Motherboard? I could run it as a server, but I don't need to consume that power for anything really, so it just sits in a closet for years until I throw it out.

Because you keep editing in more stuff - I'm really not sure I can blame them on the "making new hardware terminology" line. It really doesn't seem like it's so you can't compare it. There's plenty of benchmarks comparing it. They clearly went to ARM because it got them a ton of compute power on very little power. Yes, it can't compare to an old Intel chip the same way, but there's plenty of folks pursuing this line, and it seems like it's been well worthwhile.

    a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors.

Can you elaborate?

Don't question or think, just hates muha apple

Connect a 4K monitor or TV to a Mac.

The result is tiny widgets.

Still dont get it. Using a 4K LG display with a Macbook and everything works as intended. Whats your specific issue? What does "tiny widgets" mean?

Completely incorrect. Plenty of actual reasons to dislike Apple, no need to fabricate new ones.

I'm typing this on a 4K monitor connected to a Mac and everything is perfect.

I don't remember what the default behavior is when MacOS sees a new 4K monitor, but you can go into the display preferences and choose "Larger Text" (essentially, 2X UI scaling) or "More Space" (no scaling, "tiny widgets") or incremental noninteger scaling modes in between.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dmin2flhod4rkqxfm494k/macos_d...

Does not that just result in a 1920×1080 resolution with low res text?

Try using the same screen on Linux, take a close picture of text and compare.

3rd party monitors have the HiDPI mode disabled.

I'm not sure Linux is the comparison point you want for "handles high resolution consistently with various monitors." I'm sure I could mess around with settings to get any behavior I want, but I've been wrangling multi-monitor high-res setups on Linux for over a decade and it's never been better than OS X's monitor handling. They both have plenty of issues.

I think I see the cause of confusion here.

After some googling, it looks like M1 (and I guess M2) Macs don't always expose HiDPI options for 3rd party displays. That sucks. WTF is Apple doing? I'm not sure if there are workarounds or what. I will research this before buying an Apple Silicon based Mac, that's for sure.

I have a Intel Mac (latest MacOS) and have never experienced this problem with a variety of 3rd party monitors over the years. So I didn't even realize this was an issue.

Additionally, I forgot that subpixel rendering is disabled by default. You can enable it with `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO` but I forgot that was a required step.

Well, apropos of anything else, I think they very deliberately "broke"/tweaked Display Stream Compression when they released the Pro Display XDR.

My cheesegrater Mac Pro with a beefy graphics card under Catalina, I was happily running 2 4K displays in HDR10, at 144Hz.

First beta of Big Sur, which came out with the Pro Display? I could drive them in HDR10 at 60Hz. 95Hz in SDR.

Was reproducible - by me, by many others.

Turn DSC 1.4 down to 1.2 on my monitors, and it got a bit better, HDR10 @ 75Hz, 120Hz SDR, IIRC.

That remained broken all through Big Sur, despite a huge number of reports.

Remained broken through Monterey too.

I believe it's fixed in Ventura, but I've since changed monitors.

Initially, people were wondering about the Pro Display's bandwidth and how it was doing 6K HDR and other USB connectivity, and it sure as hell seems like they messed with the DSC spec to make it happen, and 'screw other monitor owners'.

That's completely f'd up. Brings me one step closer to ditching Macs.

Honestly life has been turbulent the last few years and I just haven't had the energy to switch, even though I think everything I do at this point is easily doable in Linux anyway.

I have tons of issues hooking 4k monitors to my macbook but that is definitely not one of them.

> a checkmate to the environment

more than other personal computers/devices? how so?

In my experience Apple is the only electronics company to actually repair your product rather than discard a broken one and give you a new one where I live. With some repairs (usually just battery replacement), their products can last and be fully functional for nearly decades, and I often pass on my older devices to my family members. Yes, they are nearly impossible to repair yourself, but that's far from "checkmate to the environment" in my book.

Many of the "repairs" are discarding the motherboard and putting a new one.

Are they fully discarding it? Or just replacing it? I actually don't know the answer here, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have some refurb process for removing still-working parts of the mainboard and attached components.

From a turnaround and customer experience perspective, it makes sense to just swap the part and do the diagnostic later so that you avoid having to guess-and-check through the multitude of parts that could be broken.

What a nonsense. I had a few thinkpads in the past and if I had any troubles, their employee will come directly to my house the next working day and replace the broken part in my laptop. It is way better than the support Apple provides and also way better for environment, because unlike Apple, who makes the whole board as a single piece where you cannot replace anything, other laptop manufacturers make it possible to replace every part of your laptop independently (motherboard, ssd, memory, wifi, etc.).

My MBP is 5 years old at this point and I never needed to repair or replace anything.

Not everyone lives in US. In Europe most electronics is shipper back to the producer by mail for an indefinite amount of time (weeks to months) without any replacement while it’s gone. The item that comes back is usually a brand new replacement.

Even in the US - my dad used Thinkpads for his work exclusively and they regularly would just overnight him a new laptop and have him return the broken one under warranty. I don't think we ever had anyone come to the house/office to repair a laptop in person. This is the first time I've ever heard of a company doing that.

> In my experience Apple is the only electronics company to actually repair your product rather than discard a broken one and give you a new one where I live.

In my experience, no.

I had an MBA, battery charging chip was damaged. The laptop ran fine on AC, the battery was intact and fine - it just could not get a charge delivered to it.

Took it to Apple Store. Thought what might be reasonable... $200, maybe $300, parts and labor.

Genius comes back out with a quote for $900, to repair the charging circuit on what was an $1,100 laptop. First words, "Maybe we can talk about getting you set up in a new Mac today."

> - a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors

Why? Their display is extremely niche and iMacs aren’t really a big deal these days either

I think it’s a jab at poor compatibility with 3rd party monitors.