Is this with newer Apple Silicon Macs? My 2020 M1 Mac Mini looks unremarkably normal on my 1440p display. I'm also going between that and my 14" M1 Pro Macbook Pro, which of course looks beautiful but doesn't really make the 1440p on the Mini 'bad'.
Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.
In my experience, you can’t do any sort of scaling with sub-4K displays. This is “since M1”. Intel Macs, even on the latest macOS, can do scaling eg 1.5x at say 1440p, which last time I bothered with an Intel Mac required a workaround via Terminal to re-enable.
But that workaround is “patched” on Apple Silicon and won’t work.
So yes if you have an Apple Silicon Mac plugged into a 1440p display, it will look bad with any sort of “scaling”- because scaling is disabled on macOS for sub-4K displays. What you’re actually doing when you’re “scaling” on say a 1440p display is running that display at 1920x1080 resolution- hence it looks like ass. Back before Apple Silicon, running that 1440p display at “1920x1080” was actually just scaling the UI elements up to appear as though you had a 1920x1080 display- since it was still utilizing the full …x1440 pixels of the display, “1920x1080” looked nicer than it would now.
So brass tacks it’s just about how macOS/OS X would obfuscate the true display resolution in the System Preferences -> Displays menu. Now with Apple Silicon Macs, “1920x1080” means “2x scaling” for 4K monitors and literally “we’ll run this higher-res monitor at literally 1920x1080” for any display under 4K resolution.
If your 1440p monitor looks “fine” or “good”, it’s because the scale is 1x - for many people, including myself, UI elements are too small at 1x 1440p. I had to buy a 4K monitor so I could have larger UI elements AND crisp UI elements.
You may just not be seeing the visual artifacts on your screen because you don't know what they look like, or mentally adjust to what that screen looks like.
The same way someone might not notice motion smoothing on a TV, or how bad scaling and text rendering looks on a 1366*768 panel, or different colour casts from different display technologies. All three took me a while before I could tell what was wrong without seeing them side by side.
> You may just not be seeing the visual artifacts on your screen because you don't know what they look like, or mentally adjust to what that screen looks like.
Does any of that matter, though? Who bothers with the existence of hypothetical artifacts in their displays they cannot even see?
It matters once you get used to something better. Our brains are really good at tuning out constant noise but once you start consciously recognizing things it’ll remain noticeable. If your vision slips you won’t constantly be walking around saying everything is fuzzy but after using glasses you’ll notice it every time you take them off. Low-res displays work like that for many people – back in the 90s, people were content with 800x600 27” monitors but now that would feel cramped and blocky because we’ve become accustomed to better quality.
Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.