Mac text rendering is blurrier than Windows text rendering (and I have learned of no way of changing that despite my having used a Mac for 10 years).
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
Mac font rendering is also more accurate to the font than Windows. Since MacOS doesn’t hammer glyphs to the pixel grid, font scaling is far more consistent. Windows’ font rendering is part of the reason why their HiDPI support is so janky.
I always thought that Microsoft's commitment to keeping old binaries running on new versions of Windows is the reason their HiDPI support is suboptimal and that if you use only apps that use the latest text-rendering API, the experience is great.
How would making the pixel grid finer exacerbate the problems with a strategy of hammering glyphs to the pixel grid?
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).