gabigreenhorn Initially I felt enabling hidpi gave me strain. But now, I am feeling comfortable enabling hidpi. we have to basically play with different options in better display, different options in colour profiles and find best working combination. This may change person to person.

I found another solution. This is mostly for folks who have working windows setup (good setup without eyestrain) in personal PC but want to use MacBook for office use. Mostly office laptops are locked to install new softwares and you have to mandatorily upgrade OS frequently. My idea was to use Video capture card plug to Macbook, output the video to Windows PC into a OBS studio and see your macbook screen streamed to Windows PC. This setup is also working for me really good. I have 1 working windows setup with intel i5 config ( 11 year old driver ). I have disabled all windows upgrade on this PC. I stream the Office Macbook screen to this personal pc and able to work on office macbook comfortably. But drawback is, I can use this setup only during work from home. While in office, I use the better display software to use Macbook. For now, with all these tricks, I am managing my software engineering job. Totally all these sucks. My career at risk any time if any of these tricks breaks.

I will shortly post a separate thread with detailed setup of this.

      karthi3219

      that is even a crazier hack 😉

      I am working with the betterdisplay solution since some hours now and my eyes feel much better +better focus. The downside is, that the display now feels like max 50% brightness. (this might be tweakable through custom color profile (copy srgb) and increase the luminance to eg 320)

      What is your take on the new macbook air m2 displays and on OLED displays in general ?

        a month later

        Follow up:

        Using the sRGB profile on my MBP 2021 M1 Pro reduced my screen strain by 98%, without needing BetterDisplay. BetterDisplay's virtual mirrored screens didn’t impact my strain at all but they did lower screen quality (color banding). The sRGB profile unfortunately disables brightness adjustments, but the default brightness is generally suitable.

          23 days later

          henno You can create custom display profile based on the Apple's sRGB with your own brightness in the Display settings -> preset -> customize presets (when you click on the preset list). Default sRGB profile has a brightness of 80cd.

            sRGB doesn't do anything to reduce dithering, maybe its just me.

            14 days later

            I find I can use my MBP M1 with a monitor and it's fine for hours. If I mirror to Apple TV, I feel it. Can use a 2017 MB 12" for hours and all older Macs. Feel like problem lies in P3 color gamut Macs, (and old iPhones, unless its 12 or lower model on full brightness with display accommodations). Tried sRGB no avail, and a better display, going to try Karthi3219s settings in the morning. MBP M1 has been a paperweight as I use this slow (but small) MB12

            Trying it now via @karthi3219 settings. See how it goes, will know in an hour if its bad but for now feels ok. Seems to definetly be outputting sRGB. I use this page to test, not sure how scientific it is but https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/, still the chance it dithers the srgb for whatever reason.

            how do you feel about setting the dummy display to something other than 1920 x 1200, personal preference?

            For what it's worth I find the M1 display bearable with these settings:

            • Antialiasing set to 0 in terminal. Also affects Firefox after reboot.
            • Firefox as it has more reasonable antialiasing and scrolling behavior
            • Default Apple XDR 1600 nits profile
            • BetterDisplay config to allow increasing the brightness beyond the original
            • Battery settings in Sonoma, Low Power for both
            • Bright yellow cursor that is easy to follow
            • These color settings in BetterDisplay

            3 months later
            dev