Why Fonts Look Better on Mac Than on Windows?

If you've ever noticed that text looks better on Mac than on a Windows PC, there's a reason for that! Macs have higher quality fonts, higher screen resolutions, and better color reproduction, all of which come together to make text look its best. But there's also another reason why fonts look better on mac. It comes down to how these operating systems chose to render their fonts and the philosophy behind it which is what I want to explore in this video.
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[@bogxd]

Smash like if you like

[@RainyWolf7]

Pass, I am loyal to my waifu

[@SETPOOL]

Smash

[@BomaAnantasatyaAdhi]

If you have a crappy 720p LCD screen (an old portable LCD TV), Windows actually renders the font better and far more readable. If I connect my Mac Mini to the same screen, especially at a smaller font size, most texts are just a blurry mess.

[@bogxd]

Yeah, fair point there.

[@bobbobson6290]

But they could give at least the option which to choose. When I have a 4k display I want the nicer looking font.

[@nlmaster9811]

Sure, but 720p screens hardly exist anymore, and haven’t been produced at a significant capacity for over a decade.

[@RobloxianGaming]

@@nlmaster9811 I mean, if you're using those crappy school Chromebooks, which use the same font as Chrome on Windows, then it'd apply.

[@eprpop]

You have to consider that Apple devices come with a retina display. If you use an external monitor, lets say 1080p or 1440p, Windows font looks better.

[@YavNe]

Doesn't matter, even through the video MacOS fonts looked way sharper. Better than what? Better than MacOS or Windows? :P

[@PyranxiSux]

No, they literally loo the same I tested my monitor(4k) with a crappy monitor at my school, they look the same

[@edwardkim2416]

no they dont... i use both a mac and a windows, and even on a 4k display, windows fonts are way less consistent

[@changthunderwang7543]

I'm running both on the same machine and the same (non retina) display and this is not the case. Mac still looks better without retina.

[@FireFoxDestroyer]

with more than 125% scaling%

[@YavNe]

I prefer Mac's way of displaying fonts! I like thick fonts over thin ones and ofc, clear ones!!! :P Also, Mac should fix that wrong gaping issue and embrace Windows' way.

[@driedmelon]

Was this comparison made on the same monitor? It doesn't seem likely. I have a 1440p monitor and the fonts on MacOS look absolutely atrocious. This is because Apple has removed subpixel anti-aliasing. Also, Apple has never really figured out screen scaling, everything becomes a little blurry. Instead, they get around this issue by shipping their laptops with displays with a PPI above 200. It's not a better software implementation, they're relying on the extra pixels to sidestep this issue that they can't be bothered to solve. Some Linux distributions have better screen scaling and text anti-aliasing than MacOS.

[@wassim-akkari]

I totally agree with you.

[@yourlinuxguy]

Could name those linux distributions please? I would like to test it out, since I'm researching about this topic.

[@driedmelon]

@@yourlinuxguy KDE Plasma based distributions have the best screen scaling in my experience. It has been a while since I used Linux so things might've changed, but I would try the latest version of Kubuntu or KDE Neon.

[@supercellex4D]

@@yourlinuxguy KDE plasma on Wayland or Sway/Hyprland

[@yourlinuxguy]

ok, BTW i'm on KDE arch.@@supercellex4D

[@seanlennart4740]

thanks for the concise explanation, the rendering is basically one of the major reason why Macs are basically industry standard in graphic designers. Especially with InDesign it is super important that you have an accurate depiction of how text is supposed to look like. TLDR; Font rendering and the Finder function to preview files with the spacebar is keeping us spending €€€

[@rick-deckard]

And color tagging and Indesign not having hardware acceleration on Windows in 2023

[@RubenGoMoRadioboyPlus]

People buying a Mac: let's buy the best Mac. Same people buying a Windows machine: Let's buy the cheapest Dell refurbished and talk shit about it being ugly. Buy a Surface.

[@Xiao-Mimi]

I'm using a Surface Pro, secondhand. The set came with Windows 11 pre-installed. What happens is the keyboard would lose connection very frequently. At some point it completely lost functionality altogether. It was dead. Keyboard lights are off. Brought it back to the seller, he kindly replaced it with another set. Again, the set comes with Win11. I said, get the fook out of here, and installed Win10 instead. Now it looks like it's purring. Although the pen cursor is off by almost 2mm. Microsoft support goes: this is fine (as all around the house is burning). I searched for a solution online, nobody knows of a fix. Some say: just calibrate the screen, homes. So we all tried, but when we click Calibrate, we get just a ping and nothing. Yep. Buy a surface. Sure.

[@himeshmaheshwari1823]

​@@Xiao-Mimi He didn't say put windows on it

[@2amv685]

Linux installed on a potato hardware has smooth fonts even on TTY the fonts look better than Windows

[@JamesSmith-ix5jd]

It looks better on a mac because all of them (including laptops) are having high pixel per inch density, at least 200. I have a 1440p 24" screen, which gives me 122 ppi and the font smoothing looks horrible both in windows and in linux. If I set my display scaling to 150% the font smoothing becomes much smoother and pleasing to the eye, almost mac like, but it also makes the font itself larger, which I don't really want. So I still disable all font smoothing in 2022 and use bitmap fonts where possible in Linux (terminus font), in Windows I use Verdana without smoothing at the moment, but all XP era fonts look great without smoothing, because they were designed to be pixel perfect. I don't think that it's a subjective thing, font smoothing is a hack designed to make fonts smoother without actual physical pixels to do it properly. If you can tolerate small font size, about 12 in notepad without scaling you should not use font smoothing at all, it just doesn't make sense. Unfortunately Microsoft, Google and others are making more difficult to disable font smoothing every passing year. On my phone I have a 398 ppi and fonts are basically perfect, no way I would even consider disabling anything regarding fonts on my phone, because there is nothing to disable, font smoothing on a phone is clearer than in any physical book. I will not adopt font smoothing until I have 250ppi+ display (5k at 24"), and I will not have 5k screen until 98% of apps scale properly in windows with scaling factor at 200%. Let's hope we will get there by 2033, but I'm sceptical, given the trajectory of windows development and how 50% of the system is basically old legacy code which gives more bugs with time, but which you can't get rid of because you need backward compatibility with Win32 apps otherwise no one will use Windows.

[@bogxd]

Absolutely agreed.

[@bereck7735]

This is it exactly, I have an android phone and the font smoothing is good and the text is so sharp but you will never notice any pixelation whatsoever, same for ios too, on linux, the fonts are much much better than windows at the moment, the text looks sharp enough, even though it has less ppi, ( my phone's ppi is around 480 or above ), windows on the other hand just absolutely sucks if you use any fancy new font with nice glyphs and ligatures, the quality sucks and results so much pixelation, causing eye strain too, even with mactype tuner, its decent, but mactype tuner also like introduces more issues.

[@bereck7735]

About the 5k display though, the problem is the screen size, we can afford extremely high ppi because our screens are smaller, make it larger and it will start to suffer, plus gpus wont be able to handle that much ppi properly and it would require insane amount of resources to do that

[@johnmacward]

I'm a Mac user and I always preferred the way Mac represented fonts. However your initial visual wasn't terribly fair on Windows. You showed the crisp clear San Francisco font on a RETINA Macbook screen with a very high DPI (any font would look good on that screen), and the Windows comparison was a much lower DPI so not at all a fair comparison. The major advantage on the Mac side today is that for a long time, everything Apple and Mac has been super high quality, high pixel density displays - MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, even Apple Watch has a super high DPI and hence all these devices can easily represent fonts accurately and highly readable. This is where Windows falls behind in not pushing computer manufacturers to adopt better quality screens.

[@firestormjupiter]

The target audience is different. Apple has the luxury of charging forward with the latest exclusive technology because their userbase is more niche and users are basically expected to buy new devices every couple of years. Windows focuses on backward compatibility and needs to make software that works on 10+ year old hardware for use in corporations.

[@UltraZelda64]

I haven't used Mac or Windows in years, but I don't remember ever having a problem with Windows' fonts. They looked fine, maybe a bit sharp, but they got the job done. I've only used Macs a very little bit and haven't touched it since early versions of OS X, but I do recall it having a pretty attractive, "fuller" appearance compared to Windows. I recall I was able to tweak the font rendering/hinting settings in Linux at the time to make it look either sharp like Windows, or thick and full like Mac. Linux... the best of both worlds. I would never go back.

[@rodvor]

Used Macbook for multiple years and work forced to change to windows. I wanted to rip my eyes out when looking at the font

[@bakuza567]

I hate windows fonts in UWP apps when displayed on a 1080p monitos, they're really blurry. But on 1440p (125% scale) the issue is gone, especially when using custom scaling. On 4k fonts are really blurry on old apps and really good on the newer ones.

[@gerald8573]

The initial windows screencap is in lower resolution overall. It can be seen on non text elements. Not a fair comparison at all.

[@SchwarzAA]

after getting an oled panel with a different RGB pixel layout i want to say the apple may have a point here, i use MacType to make my screen readable windows need to fix it

[@Lintrospection]

omg how did I not know this was a thing. text on my computer looks so much better now. thank you stranger.

[@SchwarzAA]

@@Lintrospection you're welcome

[@tusharsnn]

I think the reason is how scaling is achieved on both these platforms. If you want to compare, you must make sure they are at integer scaling, example 100%, 200%, etc. Fractional scaling is bound to cause pixelation issues on Windows. But this is because Windows doesn't use the technique Mac uses. On windows, an app decides how it want to draw text based on the scaling. So when you give an app a fractional scaling, pixel location also comes out as fractional, but as we know fractional pixel is cannot be drawn, for 1.5 you have to choose 1 or 2 based on what you think would be appropriate. MacOS OTOH, creates a virtual canvas, basically a screen which is twice as big as the current effective resolution (after accounting for the selected scaling). Then the app draws texts as if this (2x resolution, Eg 2K -> 4K) is what the "real" resolution is. App never have to work with the scaling factor (even though it can). All the work of converting this to real pixel is done by the platform. Now this should look better in all case, no matter if you're using integer scaling or fractional. Pixel perfect output. But as one can already imagine, it requires 2x power to use this technique. Both CPU and GPU needs to be powerful enough so they don't start lagging. In the case of Apple, they know they have the powerful hardwares supporting their devices, so they chose 2x drawing canvas technique. Windows, which has to support all kinds of devices and resolution ranging from crappy CPUs to unsupported hardwares. They can't make such assumption about the power of their devices. So they let the app to decide how they want to look if "this" is the effective resolution.

[@huge_balls]

This is a really good point

[@rafayahmed6259]

Thanks for the explanation.

[@aabon]

So Apple contributes to global warming just to attract customers with bit better looking fonts. Evil bastards!

[@yeahiknow464]

to be honest i was expecting a solution in the end of the video

[@roshanekka9687]

the solution is : get a mac

[@Aragubas]

after successfully making my Hackintosh, I prefer Apple's way of rendering text

[@newgap1980]

I'd would be very much interested in learning how to align the text to the pixel grid.

[@CK113th121]

just bought a Mac, I hate almost everything that's different from Windows. But this is the only reason I still keep it.

[@bogxd]

I hated it for the first 3-4 months too, then I slowly got used to it and now I use it everyday and I''m not looking back at windows (except for gaming of course)

[@RobinTFH]

My business is publishing, both print and electronic, and the ability to render founts (UK!) on my iMac Pro is essential. Referring to another comment below, I use my television attached to my MacBook Air to watch television, including KZbin. I do not find reading small typefaces (like in the comments section of this video) any problem at all, the characters are definitely not 'blurry', I would suggest checking the Macs video settings to optimise to the screen bring used. That usually solves the problem. Incidentally, I never have any problem working with the TV as an external monitor; it is straightforward to put the Dock wherever I need it, and to move windows between monitors. Separate windows within Safari is very easy, as is splitting a tab into a new window, or moving a window to being a tab. AND, cmd (not alt) switches applications. Thanks, I enjoy your videos,

[@insoft_uk]

I prefer Mac, use Windows 10 & macOS and find macOS text nicer to read than the harshness of Windows 10 it hurts my poor eyes 👀

[@lukaspriyambodo]

I noticed that on Windows 11, font rendering has now become more softer.

[@OffTheScriptPodcast]

I never knew why but I always loved Mac and would buy Mac because it was more pleasing to work on then a windows.. now I see why

[@nirnullz]

Prefer macs font rendering hands down. I always feeling uncomfortable when reading web article on windows, you know, the same feeling when reading bad printing on the printed book 😡

[@davisgeorge7926]

Try comparing the fonts on Windows Surface and Mac

[@perfectionbox]

The Mac way makes it easier for graphic/publishing apps to use text, on Windows some extra work is needed to ensure the needed WYSIWYG layout. But for other apps the Windows way is fine especially if one doesn't have a high resolution display.

[@martinwhosoever]

In Costa Rica we have a saying that goes: “Para gustos, colores.” Which means something like: “Colors for tastes.” I would say no one is better, it all depends on preference. I personally prefer Mac, but again, that's me.

[@RayFromAus]

Thanks, Mac is way better. I hate windows Jizzery fonts.

[@bogxd]

👌👌

[@Faith2472h]

I've been using mac most of my life and recently bought dell xps 15. I kept thinking it was broken because of how the text looked compared to what i'm used to (mac OS). I kept adjust resolution and did clear text thing and man ... night and day to my eyes as far as how text look between windows and mac. Apple does it better

[@2amv685]

Windows users who never used an os other than Win can't notice how ugly the fonts look on Win until they use Mac or Linux

[@raccoonboi_tl]

This is like, one of the main reasons I’ll have to pay apple obscene amounts of money going forward. You can’t really go back.

[@affieuk]

My question is why do the fonts on Linux look horrible, very thin and too much space. I prefer both Mac and Windows fonts over Linux. Any suggestions on how to improve on Linux?

[@bogxd]

I have absolutely no idea xd. Never ventured into the wild land of Linux.

[@gurbuz12345]

Enable grayscale font antialiasing, turn off hinting and set the default fonts however you want using fontconfig. For example, as metric compatible FOSS alternative of Times New Roman, Nimbus Roman looks marginally better than the default Liberation Serif. Roboto looks marginally better than both default Liberation Sans and original Arial etc.

[@Qmayb]

Underrated content, thanks buddy. I have windows, but i cant denny, Mac is better on this one.

[@bogxd]

Ayee thanks for the comment

[@NevermindMe77]

I will assume it is the same on iOS

[@jellystones72]

This is actually backwards. Mac fonts look better in this video because the screen they are using is much higher resolution than the Windows screens. . If Windows used the same screen, the font would look the same or better. On a lower resolution screen (every non 5k monitor out there), Windows destroys Mac in font quality. The reason for this is because Windows uses something called subpixel rendering (each pixel can be broken down into 3 subpixels) to make fonts sharper. Mac OS does not do this, and so requires very expensive screens to look as good

[@voidnimbus]

In windows, (if it was good) this should be an easy configuration

[@beyaz487]

Windwos XP (without ClearType): THE WORST ONE🤣

[@theperfectionist1607]

Same with Linux. Fonts look better on linux than on windows

[@Redyf]

Font rendering on Linux is wayyyyyyyyy better than on windows too.

[@betelgeuseval]

i thought both are the same

[@EV_car2013]

macOS is just very good and Mac is just very good

[@nickn1991]

어쩐지 뭔가 다르더라.

[@ZAPNEP]

Mac OS font is trash. It nearly destroyed my eyes with blury text. I used it for a month and it was a nightmare. I sold it and bought windows with oled.

[@jasonking852]

So how does one fix the fonts looking like they do on Windows? Ie how to get them like the mac?

[@bogxd]

le I dont know xd

[@GCBuser]

Mactype

[@jedipdx]

Windows 10/11 is better for 1080p screens. On HiDPI screens Mac is better.

[@enitalp]

Mac, for sure. Getting old, and I can't make windows render font "correctly" for my eyes; less contrast and thinner vertical line almost disappear; THe more I use windows, the more if find the display of text horrible, And I'm a coder, so pages of small font, is my universe.

[@JKhalaf]

What about Linux?

[@jaguar3217]

You should take a look at Linux's font rendering, since macOS and Linux use the same font rendering engine: FreeType. I have a 4K monitor and I compared the results to a Mac of the same resolution and there is little to no difference. You could get the best of both worlds since you can configure Linux to use sub-pixel rendering or not.

[@entitypolyhedron]

simple, raster probably

[@tomershami1]

Apple just know how to do stuff

[@jNayden]

Just got Mac the fonts look like crap

[@anonymousgamer2839]

IDK what this guy mumbles, but I'm sure I'm liking fonts on my linux machine. IDK this guy won't exist on youtube if Xorg proect not existed, I think so.

[@ADSOYAD-p6c]

i didnt realize until now am i dumb?

[@injusticemobile2962]

Its your screen and eyes problem kinda check by docter your eyes 😂

[@Joel-Developer]

Definitivamente Windows hace un mejor trabajo, si conectas una MAC MINI a una pantalla externa NO APPLE sin tecnología subpixel rendering retina display, podrás comprobar que las fuentes se ven borrosas, lo cual resulta muy molesto y poco funcional, esto me parece un fallo realmente grave, es como si las MAC únicamente estuviesen fabricadas para funcionar con las pantallas retina display de APPLE con tecnología subpixel rendering ¿otra estrategia más de los de Cupertino para forzar a los usuarios a utilizar sus productos? Muy triste la verdad..

[@Christmaswreath]

What I'm getting from this video is: "*NIX/UNIX compositors render text nicely compared to non-*NIX machines" Can someone confirm that?

[@Spinks345]

They look better on Mac, but Mac refuses to allow proper application zoom without actually changing the font size, whereas windows allows you to type in say size 11 but make it easily larger on your screen. This bothers the hell out of me in the Apple Mail app where everything is so small and I need to zoom the whole OS which is a total disaster.

[@dimlockfork5170]

cuz macs have high ppi

[@parttimedude5440]

I thought this is happening because of apple's high resolution screens ...

[@bogxd]

Yeah that's also a big reason for it

[@edwardkim2416]

Nope, has little to do with resolution or ppi. Fonts look more natural (and legible) on mac with the same resolution and ppi

[@gordonfreimann]

mac makes fonts fat which i dont like

[@0soft]

Of course Mac fonts are much better. Windows fonts is a crap.

[@wassim-akkari]

I prefer Linux way.

[@beatsdtx06]

Apple Font is better 👍

[@RubenGoMoRadioboyPlus]

Are you stuck in 1995?

[@wesleynunes8290]

What u mean?

[@attentioncestpaslegal7847]

Low quality content

[@bogxd]

ouch