By contrast, well-designed glossy displays minimize internal refraction and also cause light at high angles to reflect, reducing the amount of ambient light which pollutes the display. The result is that the display appears much brighter in any setting, black are blacker and do not get washed out by brights. Colors show higher dynamic range, and small details are crisper. In addition, well-designed glass glossy displays (such as those on the MacBook Pro) are actually visible and easy to use outdoors in full daylight. Even when reflections show up on glass displays, it's easy to see past them because they're full optical reflections with correct depth in stereo vision, meaning that you can correctly focus on the screen without focusing on the reflection.

Glossy displays are bad under basically two conditions:

* They are warped plastic, such as on older Dell laptops, causing weird shiny glossy glare at all angles that cannot be ignored.

* You have positioned your screen so that there is a small but very very bright reflection behind you, and cannot tilt your display.

Now I have Thinkpad X280 with the mate screen and I really like it. Reflections are just not there and I can tilt the screen 180 degrees.

I considered getting one. But they don't come with on-site warranty in my area -- and the warranty can't be upgraded to include on-site service. Not sure what their deal is with that. Makes me think they're crappy machines that are hard to service. Or maybe Lenovo just don't want my business?

Comfort: I don't need to adjust myself or the screen's position depending on the light.

Power saving: My brightness can be lower, because it's not competing with reflection.

To me, these greatly outweigh any advantages of a glossy screen.

On thing which may be important: I require a dark desktop theme.

- Glare for one, never had a glossy screen not be horrid with glare.

This... just doesn't track my experience, at least with MBPs up through 2015. "easy to see past [reflections]" is a subjective point even if what you're saying about the optics is 100% correct.

Retina displays are great in some ways but for me a typical open office plan lighting will do the job of providing distracting light reflections on any glossy display, and depth of reflection has never made them any less distracting than, say, someone standing behind me -- sure, you can focus on something else but it doesn't mean they're not a distraction. Not a problem with matte screens unless there's sun-bright direct light. And for outdoor use, sure, that can be a problem, but if I'm picking between any retina model and my mid-2012 non-retina antiglare/matte MBP, the latter has won every time. Which is one of the reasons I'm typing this on that same model and dreading the day it outright breaks or falls out of OS update.

Now if you're more worried about any subpixel smudginess, it's never bothered me, but OK, that's a fair personal preference. And as for scatter through matte from light sources degrading images, outside of bright daylight, I've never even noticed on-screen quality being compromised.

But who knows, maybe your perceptual wetware works differently. And if you like glass/glossy displays, congratulations, you have plenty of options, and that's great. None of that is enough reason to assume it's a global experience.

That does not work for a laptop - the glass surface is too close to the pixels for the "focus past the glass" to make a difference.

The light which is not "at high angles" reflects into your eyes from the surface you are focusing on (+/- 0.5 mm).

You have misunderstood. You are focusing past the reflection, which will appear to be many meters "past" the glass.

But still glossy displays seem to have plenty to reflect right into your eyes.

Because developers like sharp text (as opposed to smudged due to the diffusion filter) and better color and saturation too.

Not all of us work under back lights we cannot avoid...

I mean, it might be a personal preference, but it's not like some objective law that developer === matte screen (like eg. 3D artist === discreet GPU).

A matte screen should be default for this one.

I always enjoy it when someone arrogantly poses a subjective statement as fact from a position of arbitrary authority. I like it especially so when there are a plethora of reasons against their position as in this case.

Way to stereotype..? I guess I am not sophisticated enough because I prefer a glossy screen.

> I'm often on the train and I do not envy the poor souls that work on an enterprise-bought laptop with a glossy screen and that have to swing their heads the whole time to avoid reflections from the train window.

We unsophisticated commoners work from desks and where I don't seem to have this problem.

Depends where you work and if you have control over the lighting. I used to have a horrible time with overhead fluorescent tubes, glare and flickering. To the point where I'd have to climb up and disable them. Thankfully they've gone out of style.

However on a laptop it seems silly. Last thing I want to see in my new expensive screen is my ugly mug reflected back at me.

In all three places you can move it easily (and it being a laptop makes moving it even easier).

Hundreds of thousands of developers have MBPr's which are glossy only.

The number of people doing something does not strengthen your argument. Even more so given that Apple does not offer matte displays.

Actually it very much does, it just depends on the nature of the argument.

Here it's very relevant. It's not silly to put a glossy screen on a laptop if tons of people buy it -- and even prefer it.

No for sure there are people who want MacOS -- but again those people don't have a choice if they want a Apple they get gloss. So the argument does not hold.

People buy apple despite glossy screens, not because of glossy screens.

Or if the iOS thing is a red herring, and tons of developers still buy Apple products regardless.

I'm not an iOS/macOS developer and still use Apple products (and just about everybody else in my company). And in most dev conferences for totally unrelated stuff (Golang, Rust, Java, etc.) the number of MBP yielding devs is 50% or most (and most of the speakers even more so).

If apple offered a matte MBP then you would have numbers that could mean something. You have many users using glossy displays because that is all that apple offers. It does not mean they actually prefer glossy screens.

I remember when apple stopped offering matte and TONS of people were outraged.

They did offer a matte and glossy option and some point, and moved on to glossy only. Safe to assume the buyers have spoken?

There was a huge backlash. People hates it. Apple pushed forward anyways. They knew they had a monopoly on Apple hardware and the iPhone would ensure they could make silly decisions without backlash.

Has the market spoken about removing evey single port from their laptops ? Donglegate ? There are many other things apple did that people have been very vocal about.

also billions of flies can't be wrong about dung.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

And they aren't: dang is nutricious and very beneficial to flies, they are right to consume it.

>https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

That's irrelevant, as what matters here is what makes sense for a company to offer -- not what someone thinks is "better" for themselves. And that's a popularity metric.

They have a coating to reduce glare. Consider them half glossy/matte.

I just love how good it looks. That makes it better for me.

Suggesting that people who like glossy screens are unsophisticated is just unwarranted gatekeeping.

Not all glossy screens are bad, just the ones released relatively recently are.

Sony was making near perfect high end LCDs with glossy screen, glass surface, AND real AR coating.

In comparison, later design panels simply had glossy polycarbonate with poor still poor surface finish.

Laminated and "one glass" screen also do come in varying quality levels. One glass screens with AR coatings are very, very good, but ones with poor lamination, and mismatched refraction indexes are horrid.

"The group I'm conveniently in is more sophisticated." Mmm, hmm. Matte screens suck because everything is blurry and smeared. I mean, if your work/life balance is out of whack and you have to work in moving vehicles, I could see the need. But professionals that work someplace other than sweatshops prefer glossy screens with sharp pixels.

Non-touch-screen models are matte.

At least that was the case for my XPS 15, and I was told it is a fairly general rule that touch screen laptops are glossy.

A matte screen isn't just better. You get that weird prism-like diffraction of light, that turns a white pixel into coloured dots. Personally I much prefer to maybe have to move my machine occasionally to avoid a reflection than to have that weird fuzziness. For a laptop screen, anyway.