Not a Resource

I’m planning to go back to the office this week so I started researching the options for attaching external displays to my new MacBook Pro. Turns out the whole situation is pretty annoying.

Firstly, Apple’s MDP to DVI adapter lacks analog pins so you can’t use it with a DVI to VGA adapter. Apple pulled the same crap with their Mini DVI to DVI adapter. This is annoying because — if you ever have to use an analog projector — you now have to buy and carry two adapters instead of depending on the fact that DVI to VGA adapters are plentiful in any office that has purchased new PCs in the past few years (my last new office PC came with 4, and my last MacBook Pro even had one!).

Secondly, Apple’s Dual-Link DVI adapter is horrendously overpriced. And egregiously large. And also lacking analog pins. At the moment I don’t require a Dual-Link adapter but I can see a 30-inch display in my not-too-distant future. While third parties are selling regular DVI, VGA, and HDMI adapters, so far none have announced a Dual-Link product.

Thirdly, it turns out that nobody is selling Mini Display Port to Regular Display Port adapters. Not a huge deal as there are few Display Port monitors on the market right now…

And finally, Apple’s sole Display Port monitor is ridiculously over-priced. You’d have to be an idiot to spend $899 on a 24-inch display — last year I paid $319 for a 24-inch Dell at Best Buy. Damn thing is probably glossy too. I imagine that when they get around to updating the 30-inch display it will come with a similarly inflated price.

I can’t help thinking of this as yet-another-example of Apple placing their “art” ahead of their customers’ interest. Yay, they got all the ports on one side of the MacBook Pro. Big Freakin’ Whoop.

You can find me at the Apple Store this afternoon, wasting another $30 on a stupid adapter that will surely be useless after my next laptop upgrade. Just like my Mini DVI adapter…

My new 17-inch MacBook Pro sports a 133 DPI screen. From a PC perspective this isn’t a giant leap — 130 DPI laptops are quite common and 150-160 DPI screens have long been available — but Macs have lived in the more typical 92-110 DPI range for quite some time.

The “problem” with high-DPI displays is that they make everything look small. More pixels + smaller space = tiny fonts and cursors. Duh.

In the PC world this situation is easy to deal with — open up the Personalization control panel and tell Vista the correct DPI for your screen. My last Dell laptop sported a ~128 DPI screen and once I informed Windows of that fact everything was just the right size and looked gorgeous. Back then you could still encounter problems with web sites that assumed 96 DPI and used pixel-sizing but that is much less of an issue these days.

In the Mac world there is sadly no preferences panel to tell OS X to run at 133 DPI. Leopard was supposed to deliver the “innovation” of resolution-independence but what was delivered wasn’t quite the whole shebang.

Leopard does has a hidden pref — AppleDisplayScaleFactor — that can be applied globally or to individual applications. Sadly, it is completely deficient and application support — even within Apple’s own apps — is completely lacking.

The deficiency comes from two factors. First, Apple’s use of DPI has long been a lie. Historically, Macintosh displays were 72 DPI vs. 96 DPI for PCs. No version of Mac OS X will run on a Mac that came with a 72 DPI display but this lie has been carried forward from the legacy Mac OS and maintained to this day. The typical modern Mac sports a display in the 92-110 DPI range.

The second deficiency of AppleDisplayScaleFactor is that it is a multiplier. So for my 133 DPI display I should use a multiplier of 133 DPI / 72 DPI = ~1.85. The result is that everything on the screen becomes massive due to the aforementioned lie. While the OS pretends that 72 DPI is “normal”, the fact is that developers have been designing for screens that are really 92-110 DPI. In effect the scale factor of 1.0 is really more like ~1.33, which makes the “correct” scale factor for 133 DPI around 1.40 but you have to play with it to find the setting that looks “right.”

Utterly. Broken.

If that weren’t bad enough, it turns out that developers haven’t yet got the message about building “resolution-independent” (really, DPI-independent) applications. Including the developers within Apple. iCal is basically unusable. Finder gets pretty messed up — some elements are scaled up while others are not. Safari mostly works OK but there are serious cursor glitches and Flash applets are improperly scaled. Mail… actually works great, the only glitch I’ve noticed is with the unread message icon.

I hope that this situation will improve with the next Mac OS X release. For now I’ve applied the scaling pref to just Safari and Mail but I hope that someday all of OS X will look right at the correct DPI.

This week I did the unthinkable — I laid down my own cash for a new 17-inch MacBook Pro. And I haven’t wiped out OS X in favor of Windows. I’ve had two work-supplied Mac laptops but during those times my job was centered on writing code for and troubleshooting Windows servers so not running Windows myself wasn’t a viable option. Now my days revolve around e-mail, meetings, and web apps so it’s a good time to try the OS intended for the hardware.

On the hardware front this thing is just plain sick. While I find some of Apple’s technology choices to be questionable (mini-displayport instead of HDMI, Firewire 800 instead of eSATA) there is no denying that this is an amazing piece of gear. Stupid expensive — it cost as much as my first car! — but still amazing.

I really like the new trackpad, bigger is definitely better and the gestures support in OS X is great. I’m also really digging Spaces although it is shameful that they didn’t implement a gesture for that (the four-finger side-swipe would have been perfect, it’s present use to bring up the application switcher I think is of marginal utility).

And the screen… It’s just plain magnificent. This is the first laptop I’ve had where I feel the screen is good enough for getting serious work done, which isn’t much of a surprise since it sports the same resolution as most 24-inch desktop LCDs. Sadly, OS X has serious deficiencies in how it handles high-DPI displays, which I will write about in my next post.

My biggest surprise so far is that the 17-inch MBP stays pretty cool. Over the past few years we’ve become accustomed to laptops as lap warmers — if not lap burners — so it is a pleasant surprise to find that this laptop barely gets warm at all.