Can Apple PLEASE make UI elements fully SCALABLE for high resolution monitors!
PLEASE!
I recently upgraded to a 27” 4K monitor and it’s a nightmare.
Dialogue Boxes are postage stamp sized. Menu Bar Items and text are all tiny. Text on various application palettes are barely readable.
I’ve had to increase text and icon size in the Finder, but the Menu Bar and menus are tiny! Finder prefs only work for ONE window. Size changes need to be applied to EVERY window I open.
If I go MacBook Pro without the external monitor, Finder elements are too big.
Apple has been promising scalable UI forever. Will they ever deliver?
Apple needs to do this for the iPad mini. It's insane that the default text is smaller than the text on my old iPhone mini.
I love the core UI for the current iOS, but I trust Apple to make the right call. I really hope this change means that we're getting a (less expensive) Apple Vision soon. If they could even get it to $2k I'd immediately put that thing on a 12 month plan with Apple Card, even if that meant I had to forgo the front screen and pass through.
This would be an interesting change. I guess the title bars of windows will change to floating bars above the windows. I wonder if they will integrate the menu bar into the floating title bar or leave it at the top.
Spatial computing is going to be more important in future and just now macOS only runs on Vision Pro in a standard window. It seems like this will redesign macOS so that it works better in AR, perhaps even to the level that they can be the same OS.
When using a Mac via Vision products, the apps would display separately rather than a fixed display.
The menu is quite small so they'd probably try to get it to work like the icon at the top of the window that expands into a menu. This might mean an extra click but it can be activated with hover and would probably be a vertical menu like at 0:18 in the video.
Maybe the Dock would change to being like the floating icons in Vision OS and would fade in when activating a side of the window with the mouse. An always visible Dock can still be useful for app notifications on Mac though.
If macOS evolves this way, it will be jarring in some scenarios, especially ones where people put apps full screen like Final Cut Pro without using the full screen mode because apps will be visible behind but every change just takes a bit of getting used to and Vision OS looks modern.
I wonder if there will come a time when displays are removed from mainstream products and a wearable is expected to be used instead. Macbooks would just be the bottom half and they'd only need to ship a 12" base for all of them. The iMac would no longer be made, just the mini and Studio. It would depend on how comfortable the wearable can get but 10 years from now it seems perfectly likely wearables will be a mainstream option for replacing all displays, including TVs, with standard displays being optional.
I feel your pain. My daughter purchased a m2 Mac Mini when it first came out out. She used it with a second hand Display until it failed. Money was tight so she went with a Samsung smart display. She ended up taking the Mini to the store and asking their tech manager to fix the display or replace it with something else. It took the manager nearly two hours of fiddling around with display settings to eventually get it setup correctly. When you connect to an Apple monitor it just automatically sets itself up but another brand needs manual settings to make it work and they are in many different places. It can be accomplished through so keep trying.
Odd. My MBP is connected two dual LG 4K displays and I’ve literally had no issues. I could force my Mac into a native resolution, in which case I’d have tiny everything, but that’s certainly not the default. One would have to explicitly select that display resolution. It’s also quite simple to select a non-HiDP resolution to resolve the problem.
I bought a 4K monitor to have 4K for my CAD and 3D work and photography.
Mine is a new Viewsonic IPS monitor with Thunderbolt ports (VK2776T-4K).
Nice monitor, but maybe Apple hates Viewsonic and doesn’t support their stuff?
When I looked for an answer to UI scaling in the Apple Forums I was told to drop the resolution down to 1440p.
I feel your pain. My daughter purchased a m2 Mac Mini when it first came out out. She used it with a second hand Display until it failed. Money was tight so she went with a Samsung smart display. She ended up taking the Mini to the store and asking their tech manager to fix the display or replace it with something else. It took the manager nearly two hours of fiddling around with display settings to eventually get it setup correctly. When you connect to an Apple monitor it just automatically sets itself up but another brand needs manual settings to make it work and they are in many different places. It can be accomplished through so keep trying.
Odd. My MBP is connected two dual LG 4K displays and I’ve literally had no issues. I could force my Mac into a native resolution, in which case I’d have tiny everything, but that’s certainly not the default. One would have to explicitly select that display resolution. It’s also quite simple to select a non-HiDP resolution to resolve the problem.
I bought a 4K monitor to have 4K for my CAD and 3D work and photography.
Mine is a new Viewsonic IPS monitor with Thunderbolt ports (VK2776T-4K).
Nice monitor, but maybe Apple hates Viewsonic and doesn’t support their stuff?
When I looked for an answer to UI scaling in the Apple Forums I was told to drop the resolution down to 1440p.
This option is scaling the UI, it's not rendering at 1440p like a 1440p display would be. You are expecting to leave the resolution setting at 4K and for Apple to scale the UI up. This is what the 1440p scaled setting does. It scales the UI up to look like how it would at 1440p but draws it into a 4K or 5K buffer and displays this. This way you get larger UI elements but media content and text renders at native resolution.
1440p UI scale is the default setting Apple uses on their 5K Studio Display:
I read that. Apple's description is incredibly vague. So vague, as to be pointless. Their concept of "scaling text" is actually changing the monitor resolution. Sorry, but that ain't scaling.
So, I decided to check it out with my M3 Max MacBook Pro. I have a screen resolution utility installed, Resolutionator. I tried the different Apple text "descriptions", the checked Resolutionator.
Sure enough, change the "Larger Text _____________ More Space" settings and the screen resolution changes. There's no UI "scaling" at all. The screen resolution is changed.
I want high res images, with READABLE Menu bar, Dialogue Boxes, etc. without having to drop resolution down to 1440p or whatever.
Good try Apple, I was born in the morning, but not THIS MORNING. It's total BS.
I read that. Apple's description is incredibly vague. So vague, as to be pointless. Their concept of "scaling text" is actually changing the monitor resolution. Sorry, but that ain't scaling.
So, I decided to check it out with my M3 Max MacBook Pro. I have a screen resolution utility installed, Resolutionator. I tried the different Apple text "descriptions", the checked Resolutionator.
Sure enough, change the "Larger Text _____________ More Space" settings and the screen resolution changes. There's no UI "scaling" at all. The screen resolution is changed.
I want high res images, with READABLE Menu bar, Dialogue Boxes, etc. without having to drop resolution down to 1440p or whatever.
Good try Apple, I was born in the morning, but not THIS MORNING. It's total BS.
Take a screenshot (shift-command-3), open it in Preview, show info (command-i) and you can see for yourself it's not 1440p resolution.
You can also take a screenshot at 4K with a couple of windows/panels open. Then switch the scaling to 1440p and take a screenshot. Then in Photoshop, manually scale up the menu, panels etc you want larger in the 4K screenshot and compare it to the 1440p image.
Maybe you want something like what's in Linux that allows scaling icons and text individually rather than a global scale but the end result is pretty much the same (compare 0:36 to 2:21):
Comments
Spatial computing is going to be more important in future and just now macOS only runs on Vision Pro in a standard window. It seems like this will redesign macOS so that it works better in AR, perhaps even to the level that they can be the same OS.
When using a Mac via Vision products, the apps would display separately rather than a fixed display.
The menu is quite small so they'd probably try to get it to work like the icon at the top of the window that expands into a menu. This might mean an extra click but it can be activated with hover and would probably be a vertical menu like at 0:18 in the video.
Maybe the Dock would change to being like the floating icons in Vision OS and would fade in when activating a side of the window with the mouse. An always visible Dock can still be useful for app notifications on Mac though.
If macOS evolves this way, it will be jarring in some scenarios, especially ones where people put apps full screen like Final Cut Pro without using the full screen mode because apps will be visible behind but every change just takes a bit of getting used to and Vision OS looks modern.
I wonder if there will come a time when displays are removed from mainstream products and a wearable is expected to be used instead. Macbooks would just be the bottom half and they'd only need to ship a 12" base for all of them. The iMac would no longer be made, just the mini and Studio. It would depend on how comfortable the wearable can get but 10 years from now it seems perfectly likely wearables will be a mainstream option for replacing all displays, including TVs, with standard displays being optional.
Streamlining and simplifying, too.
The yearly “upgrade” cycle is ridiculous, too. WHY?
I find it disruptive. I’ve actually chosen to skip versions a few times.
As long as my bread and butter applications continue to work, why bother?
I bought a 4K monitor to have 4K for my CAD and 3D work and photography.
When I looked for an answer to UI scaling in the Apple Forums I was told to drop the resolution down to 1440p.
1440p UI scale is the default setting Apple uses on their 5K Studio Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJuruNqxiP4&t=129s
Their concept of "scaling text" is actually changing the monitor resolution. Sorry, but that ain't scaling.
So, I decided to check it out with my M3 Max MacBook Pro. I have a screen resolution utility installed, Resolutionator.
I tried the different Apple text "descriptions", the checked Resolutionator.
Sure enough, change the "Larger Text _____________ More Space" settings and the screen resolution changes.
There's no UI "scaling" at all. The screen resolution is changed.
I want high res images, with READABLE Menu bar, Dialogue Boxes, etc. without having to drop resolution down to 1440p or whatever.
Good try Apple, I was born in the morning, but not THIS MORNING. It's total BS.
You can also take a screenshot at 4K with a couple of windows/panels open. Then switch the scaling to 1440p and take a screenshot. Then in Photoshop, manually scale up the menu, panels etc you want larger in the 4K screenshot and compare it to the 1440p image.
Maybe you want something like what's in Linux that allows scaling icons and text individually rather than a global scale but the end result is pretty much the same (compare 0:36 to 2:21):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Rnan9avoM
A bigger monitor would do the job too. 43" is as large vs 27" as 4K vs 1440p so this will show the UI at a good size without scaling:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-43-ips-4k-uhd-60hz-smart-monitor-hdmi-usb-c-black/6563291.p?skuId=6563291
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdFF0AYdvTU