I wonder what Apple will do about this for their upcoming (?) OLED MacBook Pros

Screw us all with another fashion trend for terrible displays, just like when they switched to high-glare screens.

I have for years wanted Apple to offer a MacBook with a matte screen. Now with a Framework I couldn't go back to the impossible glare.

And if a few years from now they come out with a better screen, you can self install it in a 15 minutes.

They do, it’s called Nano-texture.

Too little, too late. With the growing enshittification of macOS and the Apple ecosystem in general, I couldn't be happier having made the move back to Linux on a Framework laptop, after almost 2 decades.

FWIW upcoming Duo has nanotexture.

It's available and it works well. Staring at one right now. I don't like it better than glossy for my use, but if I spent a lot of time outdoors with it, I probably would.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/the-new-macbook...

When did they switch to high glare screens? I thought that was the original style for Apple.

Apple has offered matte screens for the majority of their timeline. Matte screens were available on portable computers from ~1989-2009, and as high end option from 2009-2013. The nano texture was introduced 2019 and has been available to varying degrees until present day.

So it was really only about 6 years in the last four decades that matte was not available. I always advocate for more matte options.

It was with the first generation of unibody macbooks in 2008, if I remember correctly. I have a Powerbook G4 with a nice matte screen, and I distinctly remember the first generation of non-unibody MBP also having a similar matte screen.

So it's been a while. 18 years with glossy screens.

Oh! You brought to mind my beloved 2004 17" PowerBook with the pulsing light: I loved that machine. I tried to use it recently but it's hopeless: only a couple websites come up.

Back in the PowerBook days, Apple shipped matte screens by default.

The magazine reviews made a big deal about the matte coatings of the day making the screen a little dimmer, so after years of being dinged on the reviews, Apple finally dropped them.

Glossy displays are much better for image quality in light-controlled environments than matte. I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings, maybe you just live in a sunnier climate and want to work outdoors? I would never buy hardware with a matte display over glossy, given two equivalent choices. You just lose so much clarity and pop to basically rub a layer of vaseline over your monitor, diffusing the nice image quality into something oily/grainy looking.

I'm diurnal. I have windows (not Windows®). I don't live in a basement. I don't control the lighting where I work.

> I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings...

Most folks cannot prevent every source of light from shining behind them. In my apartment, even sunlight leaking around curtains and indirectly illuminating the Landlord Standard White walls was image-damagingly bright on the handful of glossy-screened monitors I tried.

If you have total control over the lighting situation in your room, then, yeah, glossy screens can work... but most folks want to be able to use their computers and televisions in a wide variety of lighting conditions. [0]

> ...something oily/grainy looking.

I guess you've only seen bad AR coatings. The difference in image quality between the glossy screens I tried and the matte screens I have and have been continuing to use for the past great many years wasn't all that large... and the bonkers reflectivity of the glossy screens nuked what little difference there was.

[0] Most folks also don't like so much looking at their ugly mugs during dark portions of a program... glossy screens are -while not as bad as a mirror- so incredibly reflective.

Menubar is going to be a killer

It would be amusing if they enabled autohide by default, for those models.

I’ve got an Apple Watch Series 6 that has had an always on clock face for 5 years. In the flashlight mode in the lowest brightness I can see burn in, but nowhere else can I see any sign of burnin.

So oled burn in is not a totally solved issue but it’s not a big enough deal for me to care when the literal worst case scenario of an always on clock face does not cause real issues after years.

Not release it, as Apple only releases technology that has been perfected.

yeah like their VR goggles

and their butterfly keyboards

and the iPhone antenna issue

and Apple Maps (especially on launch)

and this fun artifact: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2006/08/24/hindenbook-re...

They use oled.

Their consumer dementia field is certainly working well, if that's what you think.

The tandem OLED screens they use on the iPad Pro stack multiple OLED layers on top of each other and reduces the brightness of the layers.

The brighter you run OLED, the more burn in you get.

The QD-OLED standard they tested in TFA is also supposed to be more burn in resistant, but they still saw burn in over time.

Tandem OLED costs more the bigger the screen and that is the reason why they’re not more prevalent in PC land.

It is also the primary reason why Apple, with its native monitors being 5K and 6K, cost more and unfortunately a nasty side effect raised its head 5K and 6K require more info running down the cable, and that is the primary reason Apple moved over to Thunderbolt 5, 5K or higher at 120hz requires thunderbolt five if you want to use a single cable.

Doesn't every display technology have issues with burn in? I have a VA monitor that has burn in as well, even though many have claimed that VA doesn't get burn in

My 12 year old IPS monitor still has no burn-in. I grew up in the age of necessary screensavers, I ain't going back.

I have multiple 10+ year old VA monitors that don't have any burn-in. I imagine it depends on usage.

I have a VA monitor that I bought in ~2019 with -according to its service menu- just under 40,000 hours of backlight-on time. It has some small hemispherical darkening along the top of its left edge that you can only notice when that portion of the screen is bright but has zero burn-in. [0] I use it for both video gaming and ordinary computing tasks.

[0] This darkening corresponds to nothing I've had on screen... it looks like the sort of minor backlight or diffuser (or whatever it's called) failure you tend to see on middle-aged monitors.

I feel like OLED burn-in is a solved problem. I picked up the greatest and latest from ASUS 1 year ago and compared to my oled from 5 years ago, there's zero visible burn-in and there's zero compensation cycles (that I can see, which is a huge upgrade compared to previous generations). Actually my old "monitor" is now a TV and all the burn-in from desktop use has disappeared.

edit: I put up a very aggressive version of grey which used to expose full on black spots on the older OLED and I can only see a very faint line where there is a full white bar from one of the applications I use, actually I think that's just my vision since I can't see it anymore.

Seems like it really isn't though. The TechSpot findings show the inverse burn-in line down the middle, subpixel disparity, and brightness deterioration. I think you can argue the latter two aren't big deals for casual users but the line down the middle of the screen seems pretty galling.

At least for OLED TVs, rtings.com has been running burn-in tests and has noted that supposed technological improvements on OLED longevity haven't really done much: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/oled-burn-in-not-improved-as...

They show a barely visible line down the middle after three years of intense usage. If I were planning to use my OLED monitor that way (I am), seeing those results wouldn't dissuade me at all (they haven't).

as other commenter mentioned it appears that TV's use the cheapest oled available.

I have an Alienware and it took a while to burn-in, I think I noticed for the first time after around a couple of years.

AFAIK, burn-in is inherent in the technology; there's only mitigations.

At intervals this long even normal leds start to lose brightness. My old oled monitor used to get burn-in after a single day.

Degradation is inherent to existence. There has never been a display technology that has produced monitors that last literally forever so if the mitigations can delay noticeable burn in long enough then it is a solved problem.

It is not a solved problem. Play some games in HDR on a daily basis and their HUDs and character portraits will burn in. As simple as that. I have an AW3423DWF that did just that after 2.5 years of use.

How many hours are you playing the same game to get burn in? I've never managed that

Factory games like Satisfactory and Factorio see players with thousands of hours on the games and those have static HUDs that would likely burn in.

I wonder if this is an HDR problem? I have played these for hundreds of hours and I do not have the same issue.

I also wonder what brightness people who are running into burn in issues are runing these monitors at. Surely using settings apropriate for a effectively being outdoors vs. a dimmed room don't get the same level of burn in but it would be interesting to find out if the relationship between brightness and burn in was liniear or if reducing brightness only a little bit can already prevent most of the problem.

Nothing out of the ordinary, to be honest. If you read forums such as reddit, you'll notice that these are not unique issues but widespread for the generation of panels in question.

Well, the burn-in is a function of brightness, so surely HDR usage contributes to it as it highlights certain gameplay or UI elements close to max brightness of the panel.

I guess those games have artificially bright HUD since they weren't designed for native HDR experience.

There are two different types of OLED. The cheap version, which is the most prevalent, and then there is Tandem OLED, which is more expensive and eliminates burn-in guess which one the industry sells the most of? With regular OLED burnin and all the other weaknesses of standard OLED are not taken care of most users have chosen to live with it. for the sake of a decent screen for playing games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H43wnV-v7V0 The only question is whether or not you want to live with the weaknesses.

I haven't noticed any weaknesses so I guess they don't bother me.

I had the dell ultrawide OLED monitor from their Alienware sub brand. It burned in enough within three years that I was able to get it warrantied. While it was away, I auditioned a miniled Samsung G7 with the intent to sell the repaired Dell if I liked the Samsung. Surprisingly, I found the uneven lighting and colors to be more disappointing out of the box than a three year old OLED panel with burn in.

OLED is unfortunately consumable but it is the highest fidelity consumer panel tech you can get atm. The MiniLEDs in Apple’s MacBooks are reasonable substitutions, albeit subject to blurring. I haven’t seen any other non-OLED compare.

FYI your Samsung televisor may not have been actual "mini led" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/tcl-is-right-to-ques...

Yea, and that’s part of the struggle. There are so many dishonest standards printed on displays. Rooting out which HDR standard guarantees _true_ HDR is a similar rabbit hole.

I've been seeing people go crazy over these new "RGB" mini LED panels and as an OLED user for almost 10 years now I just don't get it.

The first thing I do to test any LCD panel is fire up an episode of Star Trek: The Next generation. Invariably, one of two things happens as soon as we are presented with an exterior shot of the Enterprise

1. LCD backlight bleed makes space look dark grey/blue instead of black as originally intended.

2. The localized dimming kicks in, presenting truly black space, but rendering the stars (which are smaller than the smallest local dimming zones) super dim or nonexistent.

These latest generation RGB local dimming LCD panels being touted as OLED killers still fall under the 2nd scenario, they don't actually fix the problem at all. LCD is functionally a dead end when it comes to picture quality.

I might just be super used to IPS panels, but I have literally never noticed nor cared about the backlight issues, and to me knowing that my monitor won't be e-waste within 3 years is still worth it even if the picture quality is a tad nicer

I have an 8 year old OLED TV in my basement, a 4 year old OLED in my living room, and a 3 year old OLED monitor for my desktop. With proper care, none of these are showing any real signs of burn-in. All of them absolutely destroy the 4 year old reasonably high end Samsung LCD in my bedroom in terms of picture quality.

Touted by who, though? Proper reviews and tests will catch such things quickly.

Lots of reputable reviewers on YouTube. Some do catch this problem, but they value the greater full screen peak brightness of the LCD panels. What the new RGB backlighting does specifically that they like is narrow the gap between OLED and LCD in terms of color accuracy in wide gamut colorspaces.

I think most people run their TVs too bright, usually because they use them in spaces with terrible lighting conditions (i.e. TV mounted too high above a fireplace facing a west-facing window). I think it's easier to control the lighting in my house than it is to make my favorite TV show look good on an LCD.

Obviously that's still a valid use case, and one where LCD genuinely makes more sense than OLED, but my issue is with the displays being touted as "OLED Killers" when they aren't; they are displays that excel in a very different set of circumstances than an OLED. If I replaced the 8 year old OLED in my basement where 2,500 nits of full screen brightness would be downright painful to look at, the RGB miniLED panel would be a straight downgrade.

And I will still happily take the LCD "dead end" over the regressive burn-in OLEDs.

My oldest OLED is 8 years old and doesn't have any burn-in. Just don't leave it on some shitty news channel 24/7 and the automatic panel refresh cycles take care of the rest.

Have you had IPS panels? I have a similar Alienware ultrawide monitor but with IPS panel. IPS still remains my favorite. Didn't dare to get OLED for computer monitor since I expected burn-in over the years. OLED could maybe have a little bit better colors, but I got LG's OLED TV a few years back and was a bit disappointed to see that the image isn't perfectly even (more clearly visible with grey image) and sometimes with dark areas there's some kind of barely noticeable weird edge effect. Kind of like the OLEDs just lighting up after reaching some threshold. And some other very minor effects like little uneven flickering of a fire in a dark scene.

I have used IPS, and a good IPS is certainly more affordable and more durable but it just doesn’t stand up to OLED, to my eyes. The uneven grays are a known fault in OLEDs but imo the raised blacks in IPS and IPS glows are worse compromises.

Still, I probably would work on an IPS if I didn’t have limited desk space and needed my monitor to pull double duty for entertainment as well.

Right, almost forgot IPS glow. I have probably gotten a bit accustomed to it and if I'd use OLED monitor for extended period, I'd probably start noticing issues with IPS more. That said, I think this current IPS panel is also better than some other Dell IPS monitors I've used at work previously and has less noticeable glow.

I have an iirc 8 year old oled tv from LG. It has terrible burn in, especially red was hit hard. I wonder how true rgb might compare. The picture quality is probably worse, but if it holds up longer than oled it might be worth the trade off.

One anecdote for another - I have an LG CX which released in 2020. It's on basically 24/7 (rotating photos through a Chromecast when not actively in use), occasionally I'll turn it off at night. It does regular pixel cleaning on its own that sleeps the panel for a few minutes.

I've not seen any burn-in.

All of these burnout 'tests' I've seen (this one, and RTings as well) purposefully use static content and are basically abusing the panel in a way that is specifically advised against. I find them pretty useless for anything not an office TV on the wall running CNN 24/7, which I will never be doing myself.

I don't think anyone familiar with the tech will deny using these panels in such a way will cause burn-in, even the test here:

> ...static desktop content such as web browsers, document editors, and spreadsheets, along with creative apps like Photoshop and Premiere. We don't recommend using an OLED monitor like this. These displays are best suited to content consumption[...]

I think it's pretty avoidable on a TV, the real issue comes from what you need out of a desktop monitor. I have a Dell/Alienware (Samsung QD-OLED Panel) that's about a year old without any visible issues, but it's still early to tell in that case.

The tech has gotten better, but the problem still very much exists.

This one isn't really a "burnout test" though, that's just what they call it to get clicks. They're just using an oled monitor as their primary for daily work. This represents a pretty normal use case, it isn't a torture test like what RTings does. I don't see a world where I'd buy a monitor and not use it for static content the majority of the time.

I thought LG uses color filters (or quantum dots) with the same OLED color for every sub pixel. Which would mean individual colors can't age differently. That would only be possible for RGB OLEDs. But even for RGB, you would assume red degrades the slowest, because it has the longest wavelength and therefore the least energy.

Maybe the newer ones? Mine is pretty old as I've said. It's very visible when pure red is displayed. Other colors are fine.

Very strange.

It looks to me like it might not be worth worrying about this anymore. If you've ever owned a plasma TV you would be rolling your eyes at these comparisons.

My 2007 Pioneer Kuro Elite 50" plasma still displays a perfect, deep, gorgeous picture that sometimes looks to be almost 3D, so much so that I won't replace it with a new 4K TV until it finally dies. If it ever does....

We had a Pioneer Plasma Elite and played LOTS of PS2/PS3 games on it, we had no burn in as far as I could tell?

Yeah i had to turn my brightness up to 1000 to barely see the vertical line of burn in.

I'll never again worry about OLED burn in!

I have never had a great experience with OLED on larger screens, whether monitors or laptops. In smartphones, OLED burn-in is much less of a practical concern because of pixel-shifting and other mitigation done by the OS. The use of phone is mostly switching between apps, watching videos, texting, and making calls, rather than displaying the same text for hours so that makes sense. I still prefer IPS LCD for monitors and laptops because text looks crisper, which matters if you spend hours reading or working. OLED makes more sense to me for watching movies and other video content. In my opinion, Apple did it correctly, MacBook uses a Mini-LED backlit LCD, so you get a quality display with HDR while also having sharp text, and you don't have to worry about burn-in issues. There is MicroLED[1], which promises to combine OLED-like blacks and response with better longevity by avoiding screen burn-in issues. At the moment, it seems no major manufacturers are providing it because of cost and other factors.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroLED

The issue with text on OLED panels is typically due to the sub pixel layout, they tend to use different sub pixel layouts to traditional monitors which causes issues with subpixel rendering and can make text look blurry or have color fringing.

However, recently you can now get OLED panels from LG with RGB stripe sub pixel layouts (matching traditional monitors) which eliminates this problem and text should be just as good as an non-OLED display.

Yeah, I'm using one (the Alienware 3926), and it's fine. You'd never know it wasn't IPS except that it's better off-axis and has vastly better blacks and no light bleed.

That sounds like something someone would write a driver for that then installs a rootkit

At 4K / 32", grayscale antialiasing looks pretty good to me, so IMO the strip layout isn't strictly required. It's merely an improvement on top of pretty good.

Also, macOS has abandoned subpixel rendering and GTK 4 followed (https://blogs.gnome.org/gtk/2024/03/07/on-fractional-scales-... ). Its days may be numbered.

I am not at all in favor of removing the possibility to have subpixel rendering, by the way. "Low" DPI screens are extremely common and probably will be for many years. I absolutely want subpixel rendering on these.

Apple removed it because they have only high-DPI screens left in their hardware and, frankly, they have a tradition of blurry font rendering anyway. GTK did it because they like to remove features and pretend that they're Apple. Apple is being a slight jerk about it because non-Apple external screens exist - the GTK guys are being big jerks because it's a middle finger to many existing users. It doesn't even save that much work for them! FreeType and probably some Harfbuzz are doing the heavy lifting.

I have many criticisms of Apple and their hardware, but the Mini-LED screen on the M1 MBP I had at a previous job was stunning. I was in the market was a Mini-LED monitor last year and ended up settling with an IPS LCD in the end due to the lack of premium high-refresh 1440p options at the time.

Yes, the rumours of an upcoming MacBook Pro switching to OLED fill me with dread.

You will like Tandem OLED which is the screen that is used on the large screen, iPad Pro’s made by LG.

Tandem OLED solves the problem of burn-in, but it cost more than standard OLED on large screens which is why Samsung didn’t want to supply Apple so Apple went to LG.

I've had an LG B9 OLED since late 2020, and I use it relatively infrequently (maybe like 2h per week on average, mostly movie or TV show content, rarely anything with fixed UI or logos). It does have some noticeable non-uniformity but but only when it's on a uniform dark-grey screen. When it's displaying actual content, it's not visible (unless your content happens to be a uniform dark-grey screen).

The burn-in pattern is a sort of inverse vignette, where the edges of the screen are brighter than the centre. Presumably, the middle of the screen sees more action in general.

I have a B7 from 2017 with a similar usage pattern as yours and it still presents movies and shows wonderfully. I think most people use theirs quite a lot more though.

My simplest solution to this is buying a TV panel. If all your OS-level and panel-level mitigations fail, and any burn-in bothers you too much, just sell it on the used market. I specifically bought an LG C-series 42" OLED TV for my gaming/work monitor use, and if/when burn-in becomes unbearable, I'm certain it can be sold to someone for a reasonable price. They'll likely use it as a plain TV and sit too far away to even notice any burn-in. Might be more difficult to pull off if you buy gaming-oriented smaller panels, so I advise against that.

Note that the LG takes regular screenshots, uploads them to their servers, and sells them. If you don't allow it on the internet, it saves the screenshots to internal storage and uploads once it is connected. If you don't attach it to the internet, or give it permission to upload them, and later sell the screen to someone who does do that, all your data is uploaded then.

I would not resell a LG tv that has been used for anything but content consumption.

Also the LG pc monitors use the windows driver install process to auto install malware on your computer.

Avoid LG at all costs.

That’s a rather outrageous claim! Do you have evidence for this?

Is it perhaps the case that LG TVs do not literally do what you suggest here, i.e. upload literal screenshots of what might be private, confidential or proprietary information and sell those screenshots, and that you are being hyperbolic or repeating without verifying unsubstantiated claims made by someone else?

What is outrageous is that LG does this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/1lnup1s/if_you_use_...

Exactly as I suspected, your link doesn’t describe uploading any screenshots.

The fingerprint is a visual hash, which is actually a low-resolution grayscale "thumbnail".

Unfortunately, the stuff they are taking screenshots of is already being spied on.

I've been using network-level limits on all my entertainment devices I don't want accessing the internet. If they truly dump data over foreign WiFi networks, it'd be difficult to understand how they dare to do that in the EU.

I've gone so far as to physically disable the wifi on board of devices such as inverters.

Just bought a new ASUS 32" OLED with the stripe RGB subpixel pattern... Looks like I'll have be more careful with burn in than I thought.

At my age or with my history of close screen work, how a screen effects eye fatigue is my only concern. With a bad or standard-issue screen I'll have eye and head pain immediately. For this, I haven't found anything better than high-quality IPS. Maybe others have had different experiences.

Interesting, I have the same issue and never thought to change monitor. I think mine is already IPS, but how do you know the quality from the specs? What actually matters for eye fatigue?

I look for high refresh rate and high nits. Also bearing in mind there are various ways some manufacturers fudge IPS. So I tend to stick with a make I know.

Resolution obviously plays a big part, but for me 1440 is fine.

Are there any monitors that have a resolution somewhere between 1440 and 4k? I want more pixels than 1440p, but don't necessarily want to go to 4k and have to scale everything... I've tried looking and there doesn't seem to be much if anything.

I'm not sure if you're on a Mac, but I've found the scaling to be a non-issue on my 27" 4K monitor. There are various 'use as' resolution options untied to the actual display resolution (basically: make the UI appear as though I'm running at this lower res, but with higher dpi). For me running 4k with 'use as' set to 1440p is perfect.

2560x1440 (QHD) ~3.69MP 100%

3440x1440 (UWQHD) ~4.95MP 134.38%

3840x1600 ("UWQHD+") ~6.14MP 166.67%

3840x2160 (4K UHD) ~8.29MP 225%

You either get more screens, an ultrawide, or a 4K screen and try software scaling lower.

> So I tend to stick with a make I know.

Which is?

Dell Pro P2425.

If I had the budget and always worked on a Mac I might spring for an Apple Studio but it would have to have the nano-texture glass.

Thank you. I switched back to an older and lower res Dell after using an iiyama for years because my eyesight is steadily getting worse and anything that will help with the headaches and the blurring is welcome. Glasses can only do so much when viewing screens, if the screen is not optimal the glasses can't really correct for that so I'm aiming to get the best possible for both.

Advice: It's important to use something like Stretchly to enforce resting our eyes. I started to get real relief and healing only when I enforced a two-minute eye break every twenty-minutes -- that sounds like way too much, but at the time it was necessary. Now I do the standard twenty seconds per twenty minutes.

Indeed, people tell me that 4K/144Hz 28" IPS is overkill and yeah I can see it, 2560x1440 would be acceptable but my eyes aren't what they where and I'm astigmatic and a decent quality IPS for something I stare at for hours a day is well worth the (slight) cost premium over 1440.

I have an ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM, a 27-inch 4K OLED.

I’ve owned it for 13 months now and it’s been nothing but positive. To be clear about my use case: I don’t watch movies on it, I don’t game much (maybe 10 hours a month), and most of the time it’s just a browser or a few terminals on screen. For terminal work, this monitor is a blessing. In a fully dark room, only the text glows, nothing else, and it’s genuinely enjoyable to look at. I haven’t noticed any issues with text rendering either: at 27 inches, text is crisp from 50–70 cm away, and the pixel density is more than adequate. I suspect the 30+ inch OLEDs are where text clarity starts to become a problem.

OLED in a dark room feels like magic, it's like the windows are just floating in the air

The first time I saw one, it was displaying a demo of the neon lit Vegas strip at night. It really felt like looking out of a 3rd story hotel room. If I had just woken up in a room with just that view, I would have totally believed I was there.

It was enough of a magical experience that I sought one out as soon as I could. Now, where do I find more 4K HDR content like that..

(oh, you are probably referring to app windows.. nvm)

Got the same and I'm still really enjoying it. I do game a fair bit, and when I got it I'd spend a fair bit of time just walking around in games, admiring the views. Especially good HDR implementations shine, literally and figuratively.

I had a quite good panel before but this was a huge step up, best computer-related purchase I've made in a good while.

I also think 4k at 27" is a nice density for a regular desk. I specifically didn't want a 32". I think that mitigates the sub-pixel issue people talk about.

I've been quite fuzzy about blurry fonts and such, but one of the first things I noticed coming ftom a 27" 1440p was how nice and comfortable text looked. Perhaps "regular" sub-pixel layout would make it even better but I'm very happy so far.

I remember seeing my first bad pixel. It was located on a freshly bought, used post-leasing laptop. It was horrible. I felt like if ground had been slipping from under my feet. However...

Eventually I got used to it. Since then I try to deliberately not see any problems on the monitor. This is my way to sanity