MacBook Pro 14 M1 chip

JonnyT

Has anyone tried the 2021 MacBook Pro 14 inch with M1 chip?
I went into store and tried it today and it seemed a lot easier on the eyes than my 2020 MacBook Pro 13 with intel iris that was sent back as it was unusable.
Has anyone got any experience? I’ve ordered it to try tomorrow!

theomh

Hi, I bought a MacBook Pro 16" M1.

For me, it seems vice versa. I never had problems mit MacBook display. I sold the 16" inch Late 2019. The display worked well for me.

Now, since 2 weeks I have left eye problems, together with headaches and left neck pain.

I had this left eye problems since 2005. I bought a Acer Laptop with a ugly 1680x1050 display. 2008 I changed to MacBook and Apple displays. The problems gone and never came back. This year I bought two LG 32" 4K displays. The problems came back, so I sent the displays back to Amazon. Instead I bought the very expensive Apple XDR display. The left eye problems are gone. Also with my iMac Late 2014 5K display I never had problems. Same with iPhones and iPads during the last years.

I never thought that the problems come back. Now I'm very frustrated now, because 14" / 16" M1 displays are very beautiful, combined with perfect features for a Pro like me.

I hope, that it is the perfect display for you.

And if anyone has an idea, why I have the problems. Any hints are appreciated. In the past I thought lower resolutions and blurry fonts are the problems. That seems not the case and I really don't know what'S the problem here. As I read here, PWM could not be the reason, because Mini LED has no PWM.?

Lauda89

Interesting review:

https://laptopmedia.com/review/apple-macbook-pro-14/

In the PWM section they show that the frequency changes according to the color profile. This would explain why some have solved the problem by switching profiles!

Mrak0020

Lauda89 That is very interesting, thank you! Didn't know PWM can change with color profiles.
I also want to add that I saw some repots (very limited) that lowering contrast helped with few devices with my particular problem (unrelated to flicker). I wonder if anything else interesting is connected to profiles.

bkdo

Lauda89

Thanks for finding this, this is really interesting. Based on this image, which profile looks like it would cause the least eye strain? I'm assuming the first one (P3-D65)? I'm going to re-test each color profile for a day and see if there are any noticeable differences.

Clokwork

I have not tried any other color profiles with the new MacBooks, but with the default settings, their screens make me feel awful.

yesanton

bkdo How did it go?

bkdo

yesanton

Didn't make a difference for me, unfortunately. IIRC, that MacBook also has hardware flicker from PWM, so it's difficult to truly find where the issue is 😐️

Clokwork

I'm curious about this as well. From the graph, I stand with the original idea of the P3 "seeming" better due to the overall smoother Luminance, but I'm sure this graph is only telling a part of the story. Also, I'm wondering if all 3 graphs are scaled similarly. Either way, I will have a tool soon so I can do my own testing.

Ferrero64

not really sure…. but it seems that my MacBook Air m1 is much much usable in SAFE MODE! try it guys, tell me what you think, might be placebo but just turn it on and OMG is so much better!, btw also running at 1280x800 scaled! not high dpi, youtube runs perfect parallels wont run 🙁

Ferrero64

even 4k 60 videos on youtube works good on software rendering 😃, so I guess is not so bad, 40% cpu usage xD… and omg I can use this laptop, hopefully this is happening

asus389

For whatever reason my eyes felt better looking at an Apple Studio Display with the new Mac Studio (base config) than the M1 Pro/Max 14 inch MBP built in screen. The Mac Studio was running Mac OS 12.3.1.

Ferrero64

also had to use switchres to get the scaled res, but atm seems to be my favorite device to use… yesterday went like 8 hours straight something I absolutely never do…. I am still using pressure chamber kinda glasses and that sure helped!… I had Lasik and dry eye is some of my problems, after going hardcore yesterday today I am totally fine and rn not using safe mode… it does feel "lighter" on the eyes still but the biggest benefit seems to be the scaled res, Hidpi immediately feels harder on the eyes for no reason…., Disabled the Safe mode for a bit now cause I wanna test the PS3 Emulator lol

Clokwork

Ferrero64 What does switchres do?

ryans

Clokwork @martin writes about SwitchRes in his blog here.

Ferrero64

Clokwork switching from HiDpi res mode which is a sort of native res but emulating something like 1280x800 for example without being just a plain stretched image, similar to the scaling on windows… or maybe more advanced, thing is you cant simply go back and change a custom res and say let do the screen do the scaling without either changing the res with a third party program or maybe command line? That! is as far as I know, dont want to be spreading misinformation

Clokwork

ryans got it. Thanks! Glad to know.