I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3

Hunter20 It's not actually white, notice how if you mess with turning off the brightness compensation property it will switch from a yellow white to a reddish white implying that the yellowish white you were just seeing was not actually true white. Who knows if the reddish one is true either…

One of the reasons why they do this is probably relating to something that I observed on an earlier 2016 Intel MacBook Pro: in Boot Camp Windows, where there is much less color calibration going on, I noticed that when turning the brightness up and down the screen will alternate around every 10% between a bluish white and a yellowish white. Probably as a side effect of however the hardware backlight works. I've also noticed a similar thing to a milder amount on Asahi Linux on M1 Air. Yet while booted into macOS on either Mac, this "doesn't happen".

So, to "compensate" for this variance in color accuracy, I've noticed while booted into macOS, even on (some) Intel Macs in addition to M1 ones, the white is changing very slightly (which essentially needs flicker to achieve in such a subtle amount) to prevent it from "becoming inaccurate" and looking more similar at all brightness levels… and then causing tons of strain from doing so

In addition to this brightness compensation there's probably tons of other post processing layers we don't know about that are ALSO affecting the white even further

(to be clear, this is in regards to the internal display, most of this doesn't happen with external monitors. Stillcolor seems to actually fix external monitor issues for me entirely, the remaining problem in my case though is that all of the external monitors I own have their own internal FRC when provided an 8 bit signal even with a totally clean source like an old PC, and that's still a big issue for me.)

So yes, you're actually semi correct in that "it's a special white that only Apple displays can provide".

Also, to make matters worse, Apple will still dither even if they switch to true 10 bit internal displays in the future, because they actually made any Mac that supports Display P3 use a 16 bit color space on the GPU. I'll make another post soon about this. They mentioned / confirmed this detail in the WWDC 2017 talk about introducing Display P3.

Finally, about the "black text" part - remember that (unless you're using a retro pixelated style font that is perfectly aligned to the grid) all the edges and curves of black text are actually made up of shades of gray and will thus flicker on any temporally dithered display.

P.S. a quote from a blog post when Apple introduced EDR:

https://prolost.com/blog/edr

Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR values, should they be called for. The operating system is complicit in this trickery, so the Digital Color Meter eyedropper shows “white” as 255, as do screenshots.

With Catalina, Apple quietly changed what “white” means for millions of Macs, and none of us noticed.

Between high-bit-depth P3 displays, display color management, software calibration, and True Tone, it’s probably been a very long time since “white” in a Mac UI was truly 255-255-255.

So yes, you're actually semi correct in that "it's a special white that only Apple displays can provide".

Also, to make matters worse, Apple will still dither even if they switch to true 10 bit internal displays in the future, because they actually made any Mac that supports Display P3 use a 16 bit color space on the GPU. I'll make another post soon about this. They mentioned / confirmed this detail in the WWDC 2017 talk about introducing Display P3.

Finally, about the "black text" part - remember that (unless you're using a retro pixelated style font that is perfectly aligned to the grid) all the edges and curves of black text are actually made up of shades of gray and will thus flicker on any temporally dithered display.

P.S. a quote from a blog post when Apple introduced EDR:

https://prolost.com/blog/edr

Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR values, should they be called for. The operating system is complicit in this trickery, so the Digital Color Meter eyedropper shows “white” as 255, as do screenshots.

With Catalina, Apple quietly changed what “white” means for millions of Macs, and none of us noticed.

Between high-bit-depth P3 displays, display color management, software calibration, and True Tone, it’s probably been a very long time since “white” in a Mac UI was truly 255-255-255.

Due to all of this I have given up on "strain-free MacBooks / iMacs / iPads / iPhones / Apple Watches" at this point.

Using a Mac as a desktop with Stillcolor and a safe true 8-bit zero FRC external monitor is the only way to fully salvage Apple technology

(aside from hacks like streaming macOS through remote desktop to an old Windows laptop, which is my main and only strain-free setup at the moment. If you're wondering why I'm not using an external monitor myself it's because personally I don't want to spend time getting external monitors working as I have ergonomic issues using desktops anyway, I strongly prefer laptops and the ability to not have to sit in one place all day.)

My goal is to fully switch my portable workflow over to Windows and Android this year, because, even though there are still many bad devices there, at least I have options such as different brands to choose from and easier ways to fully swap the LCD inside of a laptop

axu2

I'm not an apple developer nor a well-connected business person but I do occasionally read this well-regarded blog called Stratechery. The blog author has interviews with the CEOs of these tech giants. It would be amazing if he brought up these issues with someone in a relevant position seeing as he talks about Apple's "strength in design and user experience". Seems like they're neglecting the basics of user experience.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR values, should they be called for. The operating system is complicit in this trickery, so the Digital Color Meter eyedropper shows “white” as 255, as do screenshots.

With Catalina, Apple quietly changed what “white” means for millions of Macs, and none of us noticed.

By the way, another unsolved issue with e.g. the M1 Air is that there is currently no way to disable HDR on the internal display and prevent the sudden shifting in brightness and color profile/tone mapping whenever there's something resembling HDR content on screen.

In some Intel Macs like the 2018 MacBook Air you could Option-click display preferences to uncheck Use extended dynamic range, but no such option appears on the M1 Air at least in Ventura.

When I Quick Look an HDR image, the brightness still increases and shows extremely bright HDR areas on that image much brighter than the white of the desktop (in cases where I'm not at maximum hardware backlight). And if I open some apps such as Blender, they very slightly activate HDR mode as well and shift around the entire color profile. With dithering disabled, this is super obvious as if I have a banding test image open at the same time the banding will shift a ton during the HDR transition.

I've messed with about every possible IOMFB numeric/boolean property that can easily be modified and cannot get internal display HDR to disable.

Unlike iOS, the "double invert" trick does not work — if you combine Invert Colors with the Option-click "Inverted Framebuffer" option in BetterDisplay, HDR will still be present. (This is different to iOS where in that case if you combine two Invert Colors, Zoom and Classic Invert, HDR can be disabled)

You can also search the Console app's log for "SkyLight" or "headroom" and see messages relating to the HDR changes taking place.

It's also really deeply embedded into the color management system as well — so even if you use max brightness (to "prevent" there from being any headroom for HDR) but then apply color profile dimming or even overlay dimming, the HDR image will still "shine through it".

One way to semi-bypass HDR is to activate full screen "Ctrl-Scroll" accessibility zoom, but you can still notice the hardware backlight behind the LCD changing whenever e.g. the Quick Look window is hidden and shown even if the colors are now "clamped"

It also points to a flaw of the "quantization" feature of BetterDisplay @waydabber, as even if quantization is set to 16, and I have a gradient displaying 16 shades on screen, there can still be an HDR white showing on screen that is brighter than that which is implying that the video card is not actually being limited to 16 shades. (I understand this may be a limitation of achieving the quantization directly through the video card LUT, as the video card is probably not taking the values given to it exactly as specified. There's also another issue with quantization I noticed where macOS will sometimes display in-between "smoothing" shades that are more precise than the set quantization level, the video card is definitely doing some kind of smoothing out of the LUT and not using it directly.)

This "fake HDR" is something that is not present in say, Asahi Linux, at all, so it's another piece of the puzzle to investigate in regards to macOS

@aiaf

Andrejmm1234 If you have a 14" MBP with a replaced display with you, if you disable the uniformity2D setting in either Stillcolor or BetterDisplay Image Adjustments does it affect the replaced display? I'm curious