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  • macOS Sonoma eye strain MB Air M2!

Hi,
I updated my MacBook Air M2 13.6 from macOS Ventura to Sonoma. After the update, I noticed eye strain and burning with the same resolution reduced to 1280x800.
Even though I always kept nightshift active, as I had them with Ventura and the maximum brightness at seven notches, I feel stress in my eyes.
I had the same problem from Bigsur to Monterey and had to go back to Bigsur on iMac 21.5 2019.
This time I don't want to downgrade!
Why does Apple change the color and brightness management parameters with each new operating system??? Damnation! Advice on how to resolve this?
Thanks

I had macbook air m1 and bought macbook air m2. It on main colour profiles (Colour LCD, sRGB) for me it is as strainy as older m1, but Generic RGB is very usable. These are settings that I can bare all day everyday, and it results in less strain than other windows laptop I have:

  • Generic RGB colour profile
  • True Tone OFF (reason, because I believe True tone does not follow selected colour profile colour range, rather it applies colour based on ambient light using full possble colour range. Hence this makes temporal dithering even worse. Could be placebo, but there are other people saying too True Tone weirdly makes "sand in the eyes" type of sensation)
  • Night Shift set to full to reduce blue light and also set to custom time range from 05:00 to 04:59 - so its always on)
  • Dark colour theme
  • Accessibility: Reduce Transparency ON, Reduce Motion - ON, manual contrast adjustment half step for higher contrast. This makes blacks really black, so black parts of the screen also block all the light. There is also with Generic RGB very small shadow clipping
  • Default text size

Recommend these settings.

Also, I have purchased BENQ PD2705Q and now have zero eye strain. Weirdly enough at the begging I thought it was fail, as when I have plugged it to macbook there was eye strain. But I have realised macbook thought this is FHD native monitor due to USB 3.1 not enabled in monitor settings. But after enabling that it works fine. Using native QHD, no scaling. Also using native colour profile from BENQ.

    One thing that is super odd now, when running native resolution on external monitor 1440p and comparing Macbook m2 air 13.6 on it and hp elitebook AMD based with radeon GPU, is that windows laptop apart from obvious performance, FAN disadvantages, renders text and videos (youtube for example) much better. I was comparing the same video at the same resolution, and on windows everything was sharper, crisper. I mean this gives me an impression as if apple did jump into ARM based computing as it saw this opportunity, but it cut corners. Macbook is not a better machine in this regard, unless you buy their 5k screen maybe. I think once Windows laptops will fully get traction on ARM based computing, apple will need to start looking for the next big thing, because it just a bit odd when you put all the objective facts on a table and get rid wishy washy marketing stuff.

    The text rendering thing is well known. Default settings for MacOS do not use hinting or coloured subpixel rendering (just greyscale). The higher the resolution of a display, the less you need hinting or anti-aliasing which is part of why all the current displays from Apple are high PPI.

    Windows uses greyscale anti-aliasing by default nowadays, but still uses hinting to try and make it fit the pixel grid better.

    You can easily play around with all these settings; AA, hinting, coloured subpixel vs greyscale in Linux.

    My display is not high DPI, so on Linux I run with hinting off, cleartype coloured subpixel on, AA off and I have also carefully selected fonts that work well with these settings. I get a rendering result virtually identical to that of Windows with my chosen settings.

    Well yes, probably this is just UI specific settings, so I will take back some my statements on the apple approach. In any case, I just like to change things, and when I do, there is a bit of freshness feeling. So one day mac, another day windows, then linux/ubuntu, then back again 🙂 Regarding monitor, I would definitely recommend to all sufferers to really get their workstation right. There is no way you could work day in and day out on 13.6 screen and expect zero problems. Sooner or later, things will start popping up. On the pre-remote days, organisations would have health and safety and other stupid rules, with little details of posture, screen position and other stuff. These "stupid rules", do seam to be based on the actual science after all.

    25 days later

    Now reflecting back. I still use windows with external monitor most of the time as it just feels much more natural, like reading a book and over long time (weeks, months) it causes less irritation, and UI with toolsets just faster for my workload.

    a month later

    Donux

    Thanks, I write after some time. I also carried out various tests on the advice of Apple Care, modifying the accessibility-screen parameters. I have the always active nightshift but the situation has not improved so much. I don't want to upset colors or other settings, having two iMac 2019 set as originally Mac Os Catalina and Big Sur. I would then have difficulty to move from one mac to another in daily use. Mac Os Sonoma has an annoying glow with respect to Ventura. I don't understand the reason for these continuous changes by Apple! If it continues like this, I will be forced to return to Ventura where everything was fine without changing the display parameters, only by always activating the nightshift.

      3 months later

      Any update to this thread? Is it safe to upgrade M2 Macbook to Sonoma from Ventura nowadays? 🙂

      Anybody has negative or positive experience?

      dev