MacBook Air m4 panel(washed out?)

Garrel

New MacBook Air m4 here. Has anyone noticed any difference between this panel and older models?
Comparing to my air m2, colors seems a bit more washed out in m4. Especially blacks and greys. Like they have a bit of a yellow tint. It's not something you would notice without comparing the two. Also a bit more straining I think. Panel lottery? Raw panel serial number starts with GMGH, which I never heard of before. On m2 is FP1, which is fine but not super fine. But manageable, at least for me. Could be also related to new OS update? On m2 I'm still with 15.0.1. Thanks.

Garrel

I heard this new m4 was really good in terms of straining. Was pretty confident to have an improvement… I guess I still didn't get if panel lottery is a real thing or not and in case which manufacturer(code) should I keep. Because the process of trying to adjust for days is often exhausting and I end up returning it anyway!

Donux

Garrel This community seam to be more on better odds regarding M4 PRO, but not Air M4. Air M4 was not good most of the time. M4 Pro, was 50/50. Regarding washed out colours, this has been mentioned already somewhere - i.e. very odd variance of panels, which usually is not something you expect from apple devices.

AshX

Donux

The Airs (both iPad and MacBook) are making compromises for battery life purposes and thinness that is resulting in more cumulative flicker than the Pro models. Yes, the PWM as we traditionally think of it is much higher than the Pros, but there is more low frequency flicker and noise. I tested many of these culminating in a seizure in the 15” M4 MBA months ago. What I discovered:

Apple Silicon GPU dithering is very aggressive
FRC very aggressive
Gray color flicker is present and more extreme on 15” than 13”
Liquid Retina panels have less diffusers than the older and thicker Retina screens
Bottom-lit LED’s are different than older Retina LED’s
Diffusion papers are of a different design than Retina LCD MacBooks

These are very poorly sourced panels that are being overdriven to display the P3 wide color gamut and you have various forms of flicker from GPU dithering to FRC to gray color flicker as well as transistor leakage because of the voltage problems inherent to how Apple has designed these thin and light laptops with the intention of battery life. You can’t have a laptop that is ultra thin that lasts an incredibly long time and is pushing 10-bit color on a paper thin screen without making compromises. This is the same reason Apple is likely not rolling out the PWM accessibility toggle on older iPhones: you need to have the proper hardware to effectively eliminate or reduce flicker and these laptops are just not designed with that in mind.

OP, return the laptop. I’ve tried dozens of those models and not a single one has worked for me. Some have success with the M2 or M3 versions which I assume is due to quality control differences in the hardware as well as the chip + OS combination not exacerbating the aforementioned design flaws.

K-Moss

AshX You need to try lower resolution models. They are far easier to drive. We know this from the CRT days when in order to crank up the refresh rate we had to keep the resolution low.

Now that I think of it, I grew up on low resolution, so maybe that explains why I am not such a high PPI fiend as is the norm now.

Keeping computer machinery further away from the eyes is better for a few reasons. When I ran my CRT at 100 Hz at 800x600 resolution, I was sitting quite a good distance away from the screen, not like you see people now.

Part of the issue people have with screens is nothing more than being too close to them. Distance resolves many issues, but with the ultra high PPI people insist they need/like, they can't see the screens properly when they have a proper distance between the screen and their eyes.