If you haven’t personally filed a bug report at feedbackassistant.apple.com, I recommend that you do so. Title it something like “Poor text quality on LoDPI display”, file it in the Displays component, and in the description explain what you’re seeing. Here’s the critical part: you want to attach images showing what looks bad and what looks better, and why the current behavior is a regression and since when (earlier macOS versions for subpixel AA, earlier GPUs for 2x 1x mode). If possible, use the same display, but get an image of historical macOS when it had subpixel AA, macOS with this 2x 1x mode, Windows 11, and then current macOS at the standard 1x mode. I’m not sure screenshots will capture it, you’ll probably need to use a camera.

I know how they think at Apple. If you come at them with a bug written like OP’s blog, they are going to say it behaves as designed. To get them to fix something, you have to be descriptive about what the real problem actually is: the text rendering looks bad. Then you have to explain what used to work and what you’ve tried and bring receipts (the images). Don’t write a novel; write the shortest bug that fully describes the real problem, includes all of the relevant information including macOS versions, hardware info, and display model, and the evidence of the problem, but don’t include a bunch of emotional text or extraneous information (like SkyLight framework reverse engineering stuff).

Now you might say, “I’m not Apple’s free QA”, and you’ll be right. But, consider that you’re spending this time complaining about a problem online and you’ve spent good money on a display you’d like to use and it’s not working the way you want. Fair or not, you care about the outcome, and at this point you might as well take my advice and file a strong bug to make your case. Dupes help, OP should file one too, but be descriptive about the real problem, not proscriptive about bringing back the crazy workaround that they likely intentionally disabled because on the face of it, it makes no sense.

I do know that they read user bugs in the Displays component, because I have filed a few in there recently and they got fixed and they followed up with me about where they were fixed.

You’re rendering to a framebuffer exactly 2x the size of your display and then scaling it down by exactly half to the physical display? Why not just use a 1x mode then!? The 1.75x limit of framebuffer to physical screen size makes perfect sense. Any more than that and you should just use the 1x mode, it will look better and perform way better!

On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated.

But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them.

Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores.

I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.

I hear what you're saying about the deprecation status, but as I and others mentioned, the fact that the underlying functionality is heavily used throughout the OS by non deprecated features puts it on more solid footing than a technology that's an island unto itself.

I think the author is walking a tightrope between convincing the reader that she wrote this herself and that there's more depth to her than what we see on stage or in pop media. Writing this blog is definitely a tougher assignment than doing podcast interviews or behind the scenes videos.

You are right, of course, a good editor could make this better, but I think she's deliberately avoiding that here. A pop star is unwise to fire a good producer without a better replacement, but sometimes they have to bring out the piano and do an acoustic performance live.

Edit: I should add, I do get 4K120 VRR and HDR on the M1 Macs when connected to a monitor via Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adapter, and I would expect a Steam Machine to be similar using DisplayPort, but my TV only has HDMI input and so can’t work in this mode (and a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter doesn’t work either).

Inevitably everyone has finite time and access to games and has to make choices about what to play.

As a Mac guy, I always found the game platform wars weird because even on the weakest gaming platform there are still more good games than anyone can individually play. And even on Windows, probably the strongest gaming platform, you’re still missing out on many significant games.

I totally understand buying a system because it has some game that you absolutely must play. I bought an OG Xbox back in the day because I thought I desperately needed to play Deus Ex: Invisible War when it didn’t come to Mac. Got burned on that one, but at least I had Halo before it came to Mac (and was in the end much better there than on Xbox due to expanded online multiplayer).

What I actually don’t get is folks who have to play the hot game of the week every week. Just seems expensive in terms of money, time, and space for different systems, and you only scratch the surface of the games.

I realize the Xbox Series X is beleaguered at this point, but apart from playing games that are on Steam but not Xbox, I can’t see why I would prefer the Steam Machine.

What I was actually good, or at least fast at, was TI-Basic, which was allowed in a lot of cases (though not all). Usually the problems were set up so you couldn’t find the solution using just the calculator, but if you had a couple of ideas and needed to choose between them you could sometimes cross off the wrong ones with a program.

The script the author gives isn’t a proof itself, unless the proposition is false, in which case a counter example always makes a great proof :p

I grant it’s probably possible to do, but I think that is a lot more work and more error prone than just continuing to ship the major frameworks as they were.

From Apple’s perspective I’m sure they have a few big goals here:

1. Encourage anyone who wants to continue offering software on Mac to update their builds to include arm64.

2. Reduce download size, on disk size, and memory use of macOS.

3. Reduce QA burden of testing ancient 3rd party software.

These are also the same motivations Apple had when they eliminated 32 bit Intel and when they eliminated Rosetta 1, but they were criticized especially for leaving behind game libraries.

Arguably, arbitrarily restricting what runs gets them the biggest slice of their goals with the minimum work. Devs are given the stick. People typically only play 1 game at a time and then quit it, so there isn’t a bunch of Intel code in RAM all the time because of a few small apps hanging out, and they have less to test because it’s a finite set of games. It just will chafe because if they do that then you know that some unblessed software could run but Apple is just preventing it to make their lives easier.

And then the next question is why? It's not like they've ever promised much compatibility for old software on new macOS. Why not let it be just best effort, if it runs it runs?

So my point remains, if Apple has to continue providing Intel builds of all of these frameworks, that means a lot of other apps could also continue to run. But ... Apple says they won't, so how are they going to accomplish this? That's the mystery to me.

It’s really unclear what it means to support old games but not old apps in general.

I would think the set of APIs used by the set of all existing Intel Mac games probably comes close to everything. Certainly nearly all of AppKit, OpenGL, and Metal 1 and 2, but also media stuff (audio, video), networking stuff, input stuff (IOHID etc).

So then why say only games when the minimum to support the games probably covers a lot of non games too?

I wonder if their plan is to artificially limit who can use the Intel slices of the system frameworks? Like hardcode a list of blessed and tested games? Or (horror) maybe their plan is to only support Rosetta for games that use Win32 — so they’re actually going to be closing the door on old native Mac games and only supporting Wine / Game Porting Toolkit?

Alas, I think you and I are probably too far apart on the premises we accept to have a useful discussion, but I appreciate learning about your perspective and I appreciate your reply.