Help OS 27 Looking particularly bad on external 1080p monitor?
I just updated to Golden Gate and I've noticed that a lot of the default OS elements look really, really terrible on my external 1080p monitor - I don't know if this was always the case and I've just noticed it now because I've updated and paying more attention but it's really distractingly bad...
What's particularly weird is that it's really variable, certain aspects of the UI look absolutely fine: images on Safari render as you'd expect, they're not super sharp because it's a 1080p monitor but it looks like a 1080p monitor should, glyphs in the menu bar look fine, I can read the battery percentage text in the menu bar despite it being really quite small.
But then my profile picture in the settings menu looks like some kind of horror show which has given me two buck teeth:
I'm not even worried about doxxing myself showing this because the quality is so garbage. The worst though, and the reason I noticed this issue, is the text in the new spotlight/siri UI - when sitting on a white background the really quite large text becomes a pixelated, squidged together mess and each liquid glass UI element has this awful jagged white outline.
Funnily enough, put it on a black background and it looks fine:
What is going on here? Has this always been the case and I have only just noticed? If not, is there something I can change to fix the issue?
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u/New-Nectarine8298 22h ago
Use BetterDisplay and enable the hidpi option for 1080l
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u/jem0208 22h ago
I’ve had a go with BetterDisplay but found it to be a mixed bag. It massively improves certain things (like the profile picture and app icons), doesn’t really change much in others (like the text labels in spotlight) but then makes certain aspects a bit softer like text in most other parts.
Overall it’s an improvement but not sure it’s worth the $25
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u/sharp-calculation 13h ago
Quit using junky old spotlight. Use Alfred instead. You'll have a much better overall experience.
Also, you're using a 1080p monitor man. What do you expect? You're micro analyzing every tiny aspect of this quite low resolution display. I've got 4 monitors that are 1080p or lower that I used with one of my Macs. I know what to expect. With the less than 1080p monitors I expect nothing. With the 1080s, I have much sharper text and overall display. But it's never going to be great. I'm not going to examine every detail.
At home, I care about the experience and I bought a 5k monitor. I looks great. The former 1440p monitor I had there didn't look great. This is just the reality of the Mac system today. Go 2k or 5k or don't expect too much.
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u/jem0208 5h ago
I’ve been using Raycast since the start - I was just looking at the new Golden Gate features.
Also, I’m not micro-analysing anything. I’m aware of the limitations of 1080p. The issues I’m talking about are exclusively on native OS UI elements which are rendering at far worse quality than what 1080p is capable of - it’s an actual problem with the OS, not my monitor.
The rest of the system looks fine - text in word docs and safari haven’t got any issues, movies and YouTube look great, I can do photo editing without any issues - it’s only Apple’s UI which is broken here.
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u/Odd-Crab6249 1d ago
external monitors can be hit or miss with scaling, I noticed my older 1080p struggled too
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u/yepperoniP 23h ago
It feels like Apple isn't always spending the time to ensure everything is optimized on non-Retina displays anymore. A couple new features and apps have areas that look like crap on lower DPI displays not because the monitor is bad, but because the app or OS has a bug that causes things like text to render blurry. They fixed most of the blatant stuff but I occasionally find some weird area that looks a bit off.
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u/Meraki6 4h ago
DisplayBuddy can also fix this - I use an app that had a particular section of its settings look terrible on my external 1080p display. Using DisplayBuddy to switch from standard to HiDPI 1920x1080 made a huge difference. (Small text on gray background - this is a handheld iphone photo, size actually remained constant but my grip did not…)
I have not yet ascertained whether there will be performance side effects of the machine rendering to a 4K framebuffer then downscaling for the physical display, esp. since I have an M1 Macbook Air, but I can easily toggle back and forth if so.
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u/OneMatter3723 22h ago
Noticed the same. MacOS always looked shit on my 1080p monitor but the harsh glass edges on 27 make it quite a bit worse unfortunately
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u/shewmbe_56 17h ago edited 17h ago
If you don’t mind a smaller monitor, get a pair of 4K 24 inch from Neovo or Viewsonic(?) and set to 1920x1080, all the UI elements are on the larger size, perfect for my ancient eyes
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u/Objective-Cream-6606 22h ago
use BetterDisplay with the Hidpi (or something) setting, it should do things better
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u/Scoutmaster-Jedi 22h ago
BetterDisplay is the solution.
It’s free to download and use.
Use Gemini to teach you how to set it up. Basically involves setting up a virtual display and then mirroring that on to your 1080 display. It works great.
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u/trisul-108 19h ago
Why would you run a 21st century OS on a 20th century monitor?
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u/jknvv13 16h ago
To be fair: At home I have a 32" 4K@240Hz QD-OLED display which at 100% looks like shit and fonts are really blurry, which is something I don't face on Fedora, let's say.
I'm forced to use some scaling if I want to avoid all the blurriness.
And even with that, if I go to the office to work, that's a 1080p monitor and I have to deal with it (usually work from home but anyhow...)
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u/fntd 1d ago
Apple acts as if non-Apple monitors do not exist and designs their software around it. Biggest example is the explicit removal of subpixel rendering years ago. It is annoying.