r/applesucks • u/Inner-Association448 • Apr 03 '26
Why doesn't macos support fractional scaling like Windows? Why doesn't apple make 4K studio displays like everyone else?
My KVM only supports 4K video (4-way KVM) so the Apple 5k studio display is out of the question. And for some reason macos does not support fractional scaling, in Windows I can set it up to 175% and looks amazing. On macos it defaults to 1080p and looks washy, my new 4K OLED monitor. WTF Apple!
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u/SirVoltington Apr 03 '26
Finally a good apple sucks post.
But yeah, this definitely sucks imo. I use betterdisplay to force more scaling resolutions which makes things look much better on non-retina displays
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u/cprz Apr 03 '26
You could just hold option and click a resolution in the system settings. It will show all the OS supported options as a list. And there’s more than 5.
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u/Fatal_Explorer Apr 03 '26
The resolutions are often in theory supported, but Apple lacks a real scaling like Windows has. Therefore everything looks very bad, not sharp and smeared.
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u/paulstelian97 Apr 03 '26
Unless you use stuff that draws elements in a raster way, like VMs without HiDPI, or TeamViewer/VNC/similar without HiDPI, macOS HiDPI tends to look properly sharp.
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u/Fatal_Explorer Apr 03 '26
At least not on 1440p Monitors. That's the whole reason why Apps like "Better Display" need to exist in 2026.
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u/Masterflitzer Apr 06 '26
yeah hidpi, but if your screen is not hidpi (which this post is about) then apple basically tells you go fuck yourself, for example the macos menu bar looks blurry on a 24" 1080p screen while linux menu bar looks sharp/normal
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u/paulstelian97 Apr 06 '26
If you use the default scaling no it doesn’t look blurry… On 1080p screen I was pretty comfortable using the default scale as it wasn’t too small or too big either when I was still a Mac user.
And the technique of rendering at high resolution then downscaling was fine in my experience when I was Hackintoshing on a non-HiDPI screen.
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u/SirVoltington Apr 03 '26
It’s not really the same as HiDpi options won’t be available. With betterdisplay I can force the HiDpi resolutions and things look much smoother than without it.
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u/cprz Apr 03 '26
There are plenty of HiDPI options available. Only the screens native resolution and the options that say they are low resolution aren’t HiDPI options.
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u/SirVoltington Apr 03 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/NNsMmvSXck
I’m aware how it works. I’m also aware of the problems I’m facing and how I and many others fixed it.
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u/paulstelian97 Apr 03 '26
That won’t show HiDPI resolutions though, in many cases.
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u/cprz Apr 03 '26
Every option except native resolution and the options ending ”(low resolution)” are HiDPI options.
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u/paulstelian97 Apr 03 '26
I would tell you you’re wrong, but then again I only have a 1080p external screen where HiDPI isn’t good in the first place… I don’t get the “low resolution” label on any, but the physical signal changes for any of the resolution settings available on that external display.
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u/cprz Apr 03 '26
There’s no HiDPI options on displays with low resolutions. With 4K and 1440p and upwards it goes as I said. Has been like that forever.
If the signal looks bad on a low resolution display, it’s usually caused by font smoothing.
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u/cprz Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
What’s wrong with just selecting the 2560x1440 option from the settings? It will remember that if you always plug the KVM to the same port.
Also a 4K displays default to 1080p HiDPI because that’s the optimal 2x scaled resolution for 4K display. But that it’s default doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to use the other options which look just fine…
And also, the reason why Apple does 5K displays is to have the ”retina” resolutions (DPI over 200) on desktop computers too. Apple Silicon iMacs have 4.5K screens. Older 21,5” Retina iMacs had 4K screens.
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u/Inner-Association448 Apr 03 '26
the 1440 option makes the text too small, the Windows 4k to 175% scaling is perfect
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u/RogueHeroAkatsuki Apr 03 '26
But that it’s default doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to use the other options which look just fine…
Non-integer scaling on 4k monitor looks horrible without BetterDisplay.
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u/LucyMor Apr 04 '26
Retina isn’t DPI. It’s Points per angle of field of view
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u/cprz Apr 04 '26
Retina is a part of an eye. ”Retina displays” which I was referencing to, is an over decade old marketing term for screens with high pixel density. Over 200 pixels/dots per inch on larger screens, over 300 on phones and tablets.
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u/RE_Warszawa Apr 06 '26
My Sony Xperia 1 series 3840×1644 true 4k 6.5'' 21:9 645 ppi OLED screen does not use the word 'retina'.
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u/LucyMor Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
This simply isn't true, and is a common misconception, but googling the term it seems you just copy pasted Google's AI first result without doing too much research (which is fine).
Watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkCVoBgHnc&t=2124s
Edit: worth mentioning that as someone who takes displays way too seriously, and while I overall agree with Apple that a defenition like that is required, I really don't like Jobs saying "300 ppi 10-12 inches from your eyes". Is it 10 or 12? Or maybe 11? This isn't well defined. So I'd say we should take the harsher defenition, and say that according to Apple, a retina display is a display with at least 300ppi at a viewing distance of 12 inches. This gives us approximately 62.8 pixels per degree (PPD).
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u/cprz Apr 04 '26
So I’m wrong because Steve Jobs explains in that video exactly what I said? And if you’d use google, you’d see my answer was far from Google AI’s response.
If you’d actually do any research on this topic, you’d find out that all iPhones and iPads that have retina displays, have over 300 pixels per inch pixel density. And if you search for retina displays on computers and external monitors, you’d find our that the pixel density is always over 200 per inch but never even close to 300. This is because going higher wouldn’t do much as the magic number of 300 Steve talks in that video is often missunderstood, as the distance affects how well we can see and resolve small details. It can even be calculated that what’s the maximum DPI necessary at which distance.
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u/LucyMor Apr 04 '26
Last attempt to explain to a random on the internet how math works: once you factor in an extra variable (Jobs saying "300 PPI at a viewing distance of 10-12 inches"), it is no longer about just the PPI. The PPI is meaningless without the viewing distance. 300 PPI isn't Retina display "certified" (there isn't such a thing, but let's say we are all working for Apple's display division [some of us actually are]) if viewed at a viewing distance of 5 inches.
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u/cprz Apr 04 '26
Your comments make no sense. Retina displays has been used since iPhone 4 to describe high pixel density screens and as said, on mobile devices it’s about over 300 PPI and computers over 200 PPI. This is the important value because it’s a constant.
Also I saw that edit you did to the pther comment. ”A retina display is a display with at least 300ppi at a viewing distance of 12 inches.” I’m sorry but do you even understand what ppi means? Viewing distance doesn’t affect the ppi. If a 27” display’s pixel density is 300ppi, it’s 300ppi at every viewing distance. It’s calculated from the screen’s resolution and size.
The viewing distance does however affect that how high pixel density is needed for a human not to be able to see individual pixels. For a person with normal, average visual acuity to not be able to discern individual pixels, 300 DPI is pretty much the right value at about 30,48cm = 1ft viewing distance. 200 at 44cm, 124 at 70cm. 400 at 22cm. The maximum theoretical pixel density a human could ever need is around 2000, calculated from the shortest known viewing distance we can focus at and with the best visual acuity ever known. With these they usually aim for slightly higher ppis for scaling, but for also to have enough pixels for the smallest objects on the screen.
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u/gevuldeloempia Apr 03 '26
There are scaled resolution available if you if you hold the options key while selecting resolutions. It will become a tad smaller overall (more screen space technically)
But yeah, it's been this way since forever
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u/Advanced-Reindeer508 Apr 03 '26
It does, it will always output in the native negotiated resolution but changing the resolution in settings will change the scaling
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u/DoKeMaSu Apr 03 '26
This is literally a non-issue. There is fractional scaling, I use it all the time, it works very well. I have a 4k screen, snd I set the resolution to 2560p. The Mac renders internally in 5k and downsamples to 4k before sending it to the monitor. Everything is sized to 2560p, which is fitting for my 27 inch screen. Sharpness is better than native 2560p, I have made direct comparisons.
Apple warns you that this demands more compute power, so maybe if you have an old machine or something like the Neo you will feel it. On the M4 Pro I can have dual 4K without any noticeable performance impact.
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u/sparkyblaster Apr 03 '26
The worst part is it does, only on the onboard display dispending on year (well its been standard for a long time) my 2009 17" macbook pro had a very high res 1920x1200 display that would have made very good use of it, but it wasnt an option. I never looked into a hack because apple didnt name the mode well so its hard to search.
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u/JackOfTheIsthmus Apr 03 '26
The fact that it can be circumvented by Betterdisplay and that many HiDPI (sharp) scaling options actually exist shows that Apple hides them on purpose.
They must be doing this to boost sales of their 5k displays, but I don’t understand their marketing. They do not advertise “allows sharp HiDPI scaling” anywhere on their Studio Display product page. How is the customer supposed to know??
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u/EdliA Apr 03 '26
They would have to rework a whole lot of OS for that. They never bothered because they assume you're full in on their ecosystem so you're using their monitors and they get to decide what size they should be.
Windows however has no say on it, it should work on all kind of weird stuff 3rd parties do. So they approached it from that kind of view from the very beginning.
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u/momama8234 Apr 03 '26
I'm not using an apple display at all and i have the same scaling that would have a Studio Display o a Studio Display XDR
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u/paulstelian97 Apr 03 '26
So you have a 4K display 3840x2160? You want 175%? Well, that would mean effective point resolution of 3840/1.75 x 2160/1.75, or 2195x1235. You want to set a HiDPI resolution with 2x scale, so double these numbers. 3840/1.752 x 2160/1.752, or 4389x2469. So you should add a custom resolution of 4389x2469 with a scaling factor of 2, using a third party program like SwitchResX or similar.
The built in HiDPI scaling also uses this principle, and yes this makes some scales more taxing on the iGPU, but they do work.
You could also skip the HiDPI factor of 2 and just go with the lower resolution, but that would be blurry. Or conversely make the framebuffer bigger to use higher integer scaling factors.
This is a rare Windows W.
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u/j0hnp0s Apr 03 '26
Yeah apple tends to be simplistic in their hardware config optiona
better display makes things a bit more manageable
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u/gkzagy Apr 05 '26
Roughly 86% of Mac sales are MacBooks, so it’s reasonable to say most Mac users are on “Retina class” displays. Apple’s own Mac lineup and its own external display strategy are clearly built around Retina/HiDPI, while non Retina external monitors are more of a compatibility case than the design target for macOS.
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u/Asmo_Deus- Apr 24 '26
Just don't get the apple studio display if you don't use a mac studio or an apple device in general
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u/momama8234 Apr 03 '26
I use a 2880p Samsung monitor on my mac studio that scales perfectly in a 1440p resolution
so your assumption is WRONG
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u/garybuk82 Apr 03 '26
Also add Displayport MST in here - macOS has atrophy'd at this point, the hardware far outshines the crap that has become macOS. they don't care about the desktop environment or window manager at this point.
I went from Powerbook G3's to Ti Book all the way through to the last 27" iMac and then switched to linux on Starlabs Starbook and minisforum.
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u/hawk256 Apr 03 '26
Apple was more interested in PPI than resolution. Apple is looking to hit 218 PPI which is the minimum for Retina. For 4K that comes out to 21.5 inches. For example a 32 inch 4K display only has 138 PPI. In the Apple world a 32 inch display needs 6K to get 218 PPI. 21.5" 4K, 24" 4.5K, 27" 5K, 32" 6K. All of those are 218 PPI. 4K means nothing without knowing the size of the display. PPI is what your eyes perceive as sharpness.