And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. Why is the gap so large?

Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.

I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.

Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.

I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.

AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...

Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices

Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores

Apple does have some serious competition now

What brand?

2k buys you a decent thread ripper or 59xx series and as much ram as you can throw at it.

Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.

That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.

I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.

My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.

I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.

Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.

And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.

But if you don’t want Apple, or you want to be able to upgrade, check out Frameworks. [1]

Really satisfying combination of quality and value for high performance laptops.

[1] https://frame.work/

Apple is better because of actual superior technology. The chips are custom made and no one can match the technology yet.

I'll bow out here because I can just tell this won't be a worthwhile thread.

Back when Apple used Intel processors, they were at the mercy of Intel's roadmap; if Intel missed a deadline for a new chip, Apple had to change plans. Obviously, that's no longer the case.

Back in the Motorola/IBM days, their G5 processor ran so hot that Apple had to create a special case with 7 fans to cool it. It was an amazing engineering feat, but something Apple would never do unless they had no choice. I've used a Power Mac G5—it sounded like a jet taking off, and the fans stayed on. [2]

They get to integrate new technologies quicker than being constrained by the industry.

Apple launched the first 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5s, in 2013—at least a year before any Android manufacturer could. And when Qualcomm finally shipped a 64-bit processor, no version of Android supported it. [1]

There are dozens of examples where Apple's vertical integration has allowed them to stay a step ahead of competitors.

The latest is the C1 modem that shipped in the iPhone 16e. Because the C1 is much more efficient than Qualcomm's modem, the 16e gets better battery life than the more expensive iPhone 16 with Qualcomm's modem. [3]

And because Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the cost of the device it's in, shipping the C1 enables them to put modems in laptops. The Qualcomm fee is significant: an iPad Air starts at $599; the same iPad Air model with one of Qualcomm's modems costs $749.

Customers have wanted MacBooks with cellular modems forever; now they'll be able to do that, since the modem will become part of Apple's SoC in the near future.

That's what you can do when you're not constrained by off-the-shelf components.

[1]: "First 64-bit Android phone has no 64-bit software"—https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/first-64-bit-android...

[2]: https://thehouseofmoth.com/a-little-known-fact-about-the-pow...

[3]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/27/apples-c1-modem-b...

- The integrated on-chip RAM dramatically speeds up memory access. Your full 16 GB of RAM on an M1 functions at cache speeds; meanwhile, the L3 cache on an Intel processor is 1-8M, more than 3 orders of magnitude smaller.

- Apple takes full advantage of this with their software stack. Objective C and Swift use reference counting. The advantage of refcounting is that it doesn't have slow GC pauses, but the disadvantage is that it has terrible locality properties (requiring that you update refcounts on all sorts of different cache lines when you assign a variable) which often make it significantly slower on real-world Intel hardware. But if your entire RAM operates at cache speeds, this disadvantage goes away.

- Refcounting is usually significantly more memory-efficient than GC, because with the latter you need to set aside empty space to copy objects into, and as that space fills up your GC becomes significantly less efficient. This lets Apple apps get more out of smaller overall RAM sizes. The 16GB on an M1 would feel very constraining on most modern Wintel computers, but it's plenty for Apple software.

- The OS is aware of the overall system load, and can use it to determine whether to use the performance or efficiency cores, and to allocate workloads across cores. The efficiency cores are very battery-efficient; that's why Macbooks often have multiple times the battery life of Windows laptops.

- The stock apps are all designed to take advantage of efficiencies in the OS and not do work that they don't need to, which again makes them faster and more battery efficient.

Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.

My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.

Incredible value.

Ah! my early 2015 13" Macbook pro died only few weeks back. I don't think any other laptop will last nearly 10 years (TBF I did replace the battery and speakers for $280 in 2020 though)

What do you think it is then?

I love it though and I believe there is no better alternative. Everything else is just the shit without the nice package.

That's orthogonal to the concept of a Veblen good. A Veblen good can very much be shit wrapped in cellophane.

The core trait of a Veblen good is that customers buy it as a status symbol. Also, being overpriced contributes to reduce the number of those who can afford to buy one.

It isn't, and it's amusing how people get riled with a simple request to justify why dismissed someone else's opinion without presenting a single argument.

> I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products.

They are consumer electronics, and laptop manufacturers are a dime a dozen. Why do you believe they are special in that regard? I mean, until recently they even shipped with a below-standard amount of RAM.

> There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.

That's the definition of a Veblen good, something that is not known for being useful beyond serving as a status symbol.

Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/framework-laptop-13-deep-dive...

[2] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

[3] https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/conf...

EDIT: typo + formatting

Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.

Which to be honest, is fine -- plenty of people want something different from a MacBook Air, whether it is the ability to run Windows or Linux without compromises (tho VMs on Apple silicon are pretty good, it's not going to be ideal for everyone), the ability to upgrade storage, or just wanting repairability.

But the battery life on a MBA is not something Framework or any of the Windows laptops can compete with right now. I thought we might get there with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips last year -- and maybe the next iteration will (and ARM64 chips have their own trade-offs for Windows and Linux (whereas if you're committed to Mac, those trade-offs don't exist anymore)) -- but right now, unfortunately, Mac is where it is at for the true all-day performance and battery place.

Even there, however, I would specify that it is the MacBook Airs that have the best battery life. My 16" M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM has great battery too -- don't get me wrong. But my original 14" M1 Max and the 14" M3 Max I replaced it with both have exceptional battery life for what they can do, but I can definitely drain that battery in under 5 hours if I'm working on it hard enough. Whereas the Air just lasts and lasts and lasts.

The chips may not have the lanes, but they have the bandwidth if only 10GbE / 4xm.2 / storage controllers could plug in. I wonder if power is an issue.

I've heard Windows defaults or more advanced Linux games can do better, but at this stage I don't feel the need.

- Longer cycles means cycle count accruement and thus degradation is slower (sometimes dramatically so)

- For longer trips, charging can be done overnight with a tiny trickle-charging phone brick, which is also better for battery health

- No need to bring a brick, cable, or power bank for shorter trips

- Impact of phantom drain during standby is greatly mitigated

- Laptop will more often than not have enough charge to be used whenever you pick it up, without having to leave it plugged in all the time

- Bluetooth and wifi can be used liberally without fear of chewing through battery too quickly

- You as a user spend a lot less time thinking about your laptop’s battery

There’s also secondary effects, like a machine being efficient enough to have long battery life generally also reducing its heat output and making it more practical to keep cool with a slow fan or passive heatsink.

My Framework and my HP Spectre (that I bought last year) both perform differently if they aren't plugged in and both make more noise than a MacBook Air. Whereas my MacBook Pros are usually silent (tho they can def turn the fan on if I'm pushing them a lot) and I can definitely run the battery down, but I never have to worry about having to have it plugged in just so I can do what I want without worries.

And on Windows anyway (Linux power management is its own nightmare), having to triage to figure out "how much time do I have before I have to move to a different seat in an airport lounge or find a plug at a coffee shop or snoop around at an office if I'm not at a set desk" to make sure I have enough time left to make that video call is like not a small thing.

Yeah, you can often find a plug -- but a) sometimes those plugs don't work. and b) sometimes the effort to find and look for one really interrupts your flow, versus just being able to to trust that my laptop has enough power to operate.

Carrying around a charging brick sucks. Now you have to get a table at the cafe by the wall. Or hope the airplane power is functional.

I want to bring my laptop to work, not think about charging it, and not worry about what I'm doing on the laptop throughout the day (video calls, compiling, etc.)

Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?

I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.

That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.

You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.

I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.

There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.

Software availability is worse for me, as ARM still causes problems. The AMD CPU are pretty nice.

The ThinkPad still have some advantages to me. There are some design choices I much prefer. Granted, when recommending to other people, they likely wouldn't value those same things.

I bought a ThinkPad recently, just as I have done for 15+ years now. At the same price point I would say its at least competitive.

But yeah, if Linux on M-Series continues to make progress, maybe I would would consider it. I'm not using MacOS as I daily driver.

Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily.

I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.

There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.

I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.

It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.

I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.

> everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device

The X1 carbon we have in our house has a 13” 16:9 screen, which I hate.

Or pick up a Framework 13 which has a 13.5" 2880x1800 16:10 screen: https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/configurat...

Ah, that is an excellent improvement!

The worst problem is they are Intel-only so I moved to T14s which is not as polished (their premium AMD option is too MacBook-like with sharp edges and worse keyboard in Z13 or something), yet AMD is much closer to Macs on thermals, battery life and performance.

It feels plasticky (magnesium chassis T/P-series belong to the ages) but it's a damn sight more computer than I could get from Apple for that money. Well, apart from the battery life, RAM bandwidth, OS-hardware integration, and build quality. It's more RAM than I could get from Apple for that money, for sure.

The battery live is the Macs killer feature. Not sure if it would be ass good with Asahi. I'm not using MacOS.

The Apple build quality is good, but I honestly do not like to handle to cold slippy smooth aluminum body.

I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!

The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.

If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

This is a thing right? You come back to your computer, and it’s exactly as you left it. It didn’t try to magically reboot because of overnight updates, it didn’t prevent you from starting a program because it phoned home to the mothership and it told them that particular dev hasn’t forked over their $100 yet. It’ll tell you there are updates and ask if you want to install them.

It’s such a relief to work on something not windows or mac in so many ways.

Plastic case?

My coworker has one. It will probably be my next portable workstation.

The 14.5 inch version is 1.6kg, 2TB, 2.9k resolution, also great design and build quality. $1700

https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.

Give it a read and do a simulation of how much it would cost you to replace the part that forced you to buy a new laptop.

Or the Intel Lunar Lake processor.

Both have extremely good laptop options - the Lenovo Yoga Aura edition is pretty much macbook quality.

And runs LLMs (https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm/blob/main/docs/mddocs/Over...)

Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year

In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)

If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life

I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/scr/laptops/appref=xps-p... ?

Sure doesn't seem to be discontinued at all?

And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.

Current models at the time of the announcement may still be produced and then inventories depleted, but those will be the last of them.

Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.

My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks

I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?

I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!

You do realize we had 1440p phones in 2015-2016 right?

HiDPI is not new, and it's clarity amazing. Stop buying huge low res screens for ripoff prices in 2025

Still MacBook is a better product for most use cases.

I buy gaming laptops because they're the only powerful laptops and their size has never bothered me when traveling

Just how heavy is your laptop?

You need a better backpack I think? I regularly carry 10kg of groceries in my backpack over two kilometers. It never gave me any back pain.

I do use an Osprey 22L hiking backpack for my daily driver, it's got a waist belt to transfer weight to my hips, a chest strap to keep the shoulder straps together, and internal semi-rigid frame... but that's more for all my other stuff, and for activities I do in the woods far from stuff like 'laptop computers'. Even if it's just in a handheld briefcase, 3 kg is not a lot. That's about as much as a water bottle - which I also have in the backpack, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that also weighs a few kg.

I herniated a disk a couple years ago due to a waterskiing accident, but I've fully recovered and even while dealing with that injury, walking around airports and so forth with any laptop is not not strenuous.

In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for the big P73, I miss the giant 17" screen of my old 40mm thick, 3.5 kg Dell Precision... but the OLED on the P53 is beautiful. 17" UHD OLED when, Lenovo?

Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.

Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.

I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.

1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.

2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.

Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.

I'd usually unplug it if I had to move to another room and only bring the laptop itself.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/microsoft-surfac...

Wtf is with the downvotes? It literally hits every requirement he had, and the surface laptops are some of the best windows/nix laptops on the market.

If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.

However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.

I am between Lenovo X1 Aura, MSI Prestige 13, and this. All have Lunar Lake so battery life should be exceptional, except of course if there are any issues with battery drain during sleep on Linux. Definitely spoiled by Apple not having battery drain issues, but would love pointers on how to solve it.

And yes, the screen is slightly lower DPI (201 VS 226) but you do get a better aspect ratio in return.

I also run a custom Windows desktop and a synology NAS, so I like to consider myself mostly agnostic.

I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.

Happy with the build quality.

Here is what I am using right now from my fastfetch:

Display (SDC4193): 2880x1800 @ 90Hz [Built-in]

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.13 GHz'

GPU: AMD Device 15BF (VGA compatible) @ 0.80 GHz [Integrated]

Memory: ---- GiB / 58.51 GiB

Disk (/): ---- TiB / 1.82 TiB

You can even go cheaper and get a slower CPU as far as I know. And for that price apple doesn't give out that much RAM.

What requirement you have is not meet here?

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.

they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.

it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.

Panasonic Let's Note. Your welcome.

It's repairable, upgradable, and has a *removable battery* (unheard of in 2025).

Frankly, I'm not sure why people think that laptops with CNCed aluminium chassis are the pinnacle of build quality.

The iPad Pro proves that weight and battery life is no excuse here for the lack of state-of-the-art display tech in the MacBook Air. And as for cost — the base 14” MacBook Pro M4 (at $1600) isn’t significantly more expensive than the 15” MacBook Air M4 configured with same CPU/RAM/SSD (at $1400).

It’s really quite a shame that the iPad Pro hardware is in many way a better MacBook Air than the MacBook Air, crippled primarily by iOS rather than hardware.

Actual reputational damage is going on because of these poor decisions, I’m not surprised iPhones are struggling to obtain new market share. They just look like old and slow phones to most normal people now, “look how nice and smooth it looks” is such an easy selling point compared to trying to pretend people care about whatever Apple Intelligence is.

Are they? I'm a tech person and I can barely notice it at all. And I don't think I have a single non-tech friend who is even aware of the concept of video refresh rate.

Whenever there's something that doesn't feel smooth about an interface, it's because the app/CPU isn't keeping up.

I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about more than 60hZ for screens, for general interfaces/scrolling.

(Unless it's about video game response time, but that's not about "running smoother".)

So you could make the same argument against high DPI displays, superior peak screen brightness, enormously better contrast ratio, color gamut, etc. Also speaker quality, keyboard quality, trackpad quality, etc.

Where does this argument end? Do you propose we regress to 60hz 1080p displays with brightness, contrast, and viewing angles that are abysmal by modern standards? Or is the claim that the MacBook Air’s current screen is the perfect “sweet spot” beyond which >99% of people can’t tell the difference?

I think the market data alone disproves this pretty conclusively. Clearly a significant enough percentage of the population cares enough about image quality to vote with their wallets so much so that enormous hardware industries continue to invest billions towards make any incremental progress in advancing the technology here.

To be fair, I think there’s strong data to support that modern “retina”-grade DPI is good enough for >99% of people. And you can argue that XDR/HDR is not applicable/useful for coding or other tasks outside of photo/video viewing/editing (though for the latter it is enormously noticeable and not even remotely approaching human visual limits yet). But there’s plenty of people who find refresh rate differences extremely noticeable (usually up to at least 120hz), and I think almost anyone can easily notice moderate differences in contrast ratio and max brightness in a brightly lit room.

See this is what confuses me.

If the UI jitter on their phone was "so jarring", it's not because it's 60 Hz. It's because the phone's CPU isn't keeping up.

Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring". And that's at less than half the rate we're even talking about! Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz, it's not jarring. It's not jittery. It's pretty subtle, honestly. You can notice it if you're paying attention, but you'd never in a million years call it "jarring".

I think a lot of people might be confusing 60 Hz with jittery UX that has nothing to do with the display refresh rate. Just because the display operates at a higher refresh rate doesn't mean the CPU is actually refreshing the interface at that rate. And with certain apps or with whatever happening in the background, it isn't.

No, it's not. This isn't about dropped frames or micro-stutters caused by the CPU. It's about _motion clarity_.

You can follow the objects moving around on the screen much better, and the perceived motion is much smoother because there is literally twice the information hitting your eyes.

You can make a simple experiment — just change your current monitor to 30hz and move the mouse around.

Does it _feel_ different? Is the motion less smooth?

It's not because your computer is suddenly struggling to hit half of the frames it was hitting before; it's because you have less _motion information_ hitting your eyes (and the increased input lag; but that's a separate conversation).

60->120fps is less noticeable than 30->60fps; but for many, many people it is absolutely very clearly noticable.

> Like, nobody watches a video filmed at 60 fps and then watches their favorite TV show or a motion picture at 24 fps and says "the jitter was so jarring".

People absolutely complain about jitter in 24fps content on high-end displays with fast response times; it is especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

Google "oled 24fps stutter" to see people complaining about this.

It's literally why motion smoothing exists on TVs.

Those have motion blur.

> Similarly, even if you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz

I don't know why you're phrasing this so oddly doubtful? Being able to tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz is hardly uncommon. It's quite a large difference, and this is quite well studied.

30hz is still perfectly usable, but you constantly feel as if something is off. Like maybe you have a process running in the background eating all your CPU.

I imagine going from 120hz to 60hz is the same thing. It should be theoretically indistinguishable, but it’s noticeable.

There is a well-understood science to both auditory and visual perception, even more concretely so for the visual side. The scientific literature on human perception in both categories is actively used in the engineering of almost every modern (audible/visual) device you use every day (both in hardware design, and software such as the design of lossy compression algorithms). We have very precise scientific understanding of the limits (and individual variation) of human visual and (to a slightly lesser extent) auditory perception and preferences.

Screen refresh rate arguments are starting to have hints of audiophile discussions.

120 Hz won’t make a difference on a TV box, imo, as abysmal state of their UI is far greater of a problem. High refresh rate is nothing when a transition takes seconds and when scroll is jittery even by 60 Hz standards. :(

Going 120hz → 60hz: "WTF? Why is it so choppy? Am I accidentally in low battery mode?"

It's similar to going back to non-retina displays after getting used to retina resolution.

I switch between various refresh rates daily, it’s barely noticeable.

Certainly if they had both side by side they may be able to notice a difference, but in everyday use it makes no real difference to the vast majority of people. Anecdotally even though I do use Android myself, everyone around me still think iPhones look the smoothest (albeit most of them have never even touched a quality phone running android)