This is driving me insane. There are literally 5 desktop monitor models in the market today that provide a natively scaled experience for macOS users. All over $1000. The only monitors that would provide the equivalent screen real estate of my 2005 30" Apple Cinema Display @ 2560x1600 are the $2800 Dell 6k and the $5000 XDR.
Apple released "retina" scaling in 2012. It's been more than 10 years.
> I still don’t understand why they have spent the last ten years trying to switch from pixel perfect rendering with variable dpi to fractional scaling.
Is there even a difference, except for the calling it dp instead of virtual pixel? Fractional scaling should be able to render just as pixel perfect if you're not using legacy applications
Back when there were only “legacy applications” they were all pixel perfect and almost everything responded to the X11 DPI setting.
Then someone in Linux land decided that stuff should be blurry by default because that was the stop gap MacOS chose when they backported a DPI setting to MacOS X.
Has changing dpi ever done more than scaling text? I'm pretty sure it hasn't, which makes it strictly inferior because everything just looks weird and not at all like it should, with tiny icons to boot.
You’re 100% correct with the insanity. I ended up buying the last supported 27” 5K iMac with the intent of using it until support ends. Then I’ll replace the innards with a display driver board, making it an external display. This is a significant cost saving vs the equivalent Studio Display.
Apple released "retina" scaling in 2012. It's been more than 10 years.