One thing that I noticed when I had to switch from a Linux desktop to an MBP is how much worse text anti-aliasing is. The crispness just isn't there, especially at smaller font sizes.
Certainly the MBP has a high-res screen and can live without it, but it's highly reflective, and anti-glare external monitors provided by most employers are mere FHD, and most fonts become unpleasant and hard to read without anti-aliasing on them.
Maybe anti-aliasing was just hard to implement nicely in OSX graphics stack, they struggled with it, and decided to remove it.
I suspect that most of Apple's "proper computer" sales are laptops where they put a retina display anyway, and if you shell out $2k for a laptop, you can afford to spend $300 for a 4K external display.
In other words, they (correctly) decided that theirs is the premium segment, and that segment can afford to switch to retina-only hardware.
>I suspect that most of Apple's "proper computer" sales are laptops where they put a retina display anyway, and if you shell out $2k for a laptop, you can afford to spend $300 for a 4K external display.
My old windows computer is dying and I am thinking about getting a new mac. It seems the choice is a $2200 imac, or a $2700 mbp + a $1000 4k 21.5inch monitor.
LG is one of the very few companies that sells 4k 21.5inch and 5k 27inch monitors. Even 4k 24inch monitors, which I am guessing you are referring to, are quite rare. They are also not really approved by Apple. I mean, 4k 24inch will make everything look too big I assume, and 4k 27inch isn't retina quality.
So what exactly are we supposed to do? There are no external monitors to buy. Apple doesn't sell any, and the 3rd party solutions are few and far between. Maybe they want everyone to buy an imac and a mbp...
Fortunately, there are a quite few Windows-oriented machines with very decent specs now; some of them have an explicit Linux option, too.
21-22" 4k monitors are indeed pretty rare; 23-24" 4k are more widespread. I would gladly buy a 15-17" 3k / 4k display, like another laptop screen, but they seem to be absent from the market for some reason, despite the wealth of ready-made LCD panels for them.
Certainly the MBP has a high-res screen and can live without it, but it's highly reflective, and anti-glare external monitors provided by most employers are mere FHD, and most fonts become unpleasant and hard to read without anti-aliasing on them.
Maybe anti-aliasing was just hard to implement nicely in OSX graphics stack, they struggled with it, and decided to remove it.
I suspect that most of Apple's "proper computer" sales are laptops where they put a retina display anyway, and if you shell out $2k for a laptop, you can afford to spend $300 for a 4K external display.
In other words, they (correctly) decided that theirs is the premium segment, and that segment can afford to switch to retina-only hardware.