About a week ago, I replaced my new Air M3 (report is here) because it was giving me enormous eye strain, with MateBook 14s with an Intel Iris Xe graphic card. As I understand, Huawei is trying to replicate the macbook series in their mate books series, hence the name even sounds quite similar. On the landing page of 14s they brag how soft their display on the eyes (paper like) so I risked it.
The reality, at first, was quite different 🙁 The display was also giving me a strain, but not as much as the Air. I did not have an eye-bulging feeling, but still something was off, some kind of migraine, just not sever, but rather light. I tried different options and settings, different resolutions, but the issue persisted.
Thanks to forums and random articles, I think for now (knock knock on wood) the problem was resolved. What I did:
- updated windows to 11
- updated all the Intel drivers to the latest.
- but I think the real solution was to set Color Depth to 8 bit (it was 10 by default, even though the panel supports only 8).
So, this makes me think that the main problem with macbook's displays is also the color depth which, unfortunately, is not adjustable. thanks to Windows and whoever runs the show there right now, you can freely change many more settings than on a mac. I believe Apple should provide this option in the advanced settings.
For now, I'm not sure how stable my solution is, I turned off all auto updates, so hope nothing will change the settings back, and no driver update will wreck it again.