Should I Listen to This Guy on YouTube Regarding Mac Scaling and External Monitors?

I have a Macbook Air M1

If you want that pin-sharp text and image that resembles your Macbook Air - especially if you read lots of text and work with documents - you absolutely have to get 4k.

I have a 1080p and a 1440p monitor for my windows gaming machine, and while the text looks fine on windows, it looks VERY bad on MacOS because of the way Apple handles scaling in general. It's blurry and looks like it needs a ton of anti aliasing.
I get headaches from looking at text like this for more than an hour.

If you buy a 27" 4k monitor, Apple has two scaling modes where you don't get the warning that it 'might affect your performance'. That's either 4k at native resolution - where everything will be super tiny and basically unusable. Or 'looks like 1080p' - which means your 27" 4k monitor will have huge icons, text and windows but will be extremely sharp and clear in image.

I have my 27" 4k monitor scaled to 'looks like 2560x1080'. This way I get the same screen real estate and window/icon size as if I had a 27" 1440p monitor - BUT with much sharper text and images.

I have not noticed any performance drops or issues in my day to day workload with this scaling. I use spotify, brave browser, office apps, watch 4k videos etc. no issue for me.

You could however have issues if you run GPU intensive software that's not optimized for macs - like when you scroll timelines for video editing or use music production software etc.

/r/mac Thread