I am in the process of searching for a Monitor for my 2018 13 inch MacBook Pro and would appreciate some buying advice.
For the last several years I have been struggling with a lg 43um7300pua TV as my monitor. This works just fine with my work PC, but the wireless mouse used with my MacBook is terribly laggy and won’t even move if I attach a jump drive. I can see that the problem is that I can’t enable 60Hz on my MacBook. It defaults to 1920 by 1080 at 30Hz. Over the past several years I have attempted to resolve this by various cables and adapters but have come to the point of deciding that this can’t be fixed and the TV is too big for a monitor anyways.
I have primarily been looking at 27 inch monitors and have come to realize that due to the way the MacBook is built there is no one size fits all solution; especially with my limited budget.
To my knowledge there is no hard fast guidelines for buying a monitor and there is a lot of conflicting information. I am thinking that someone who has a M1 or M2 Mac might get away with something more powerful and not have to worry about the consequences of imperfect scaling.
I don’t know if my thinking is flawed but I would like to get away from scaling in the 1st place, but I don’t know how the MacBook will read in a specific monitor type.
Ideally I would love to go with something that matches the native scale of my MacBook (2560 by 1600). Dell makes one model that matches this exact resolution. This model might be a little out of my price range. There are other monitors that fit the 16:10 aspect ratio. There are some very inexpensive 1920 by 1200 monitors. My thinking would be that this would match perfectly with a default MacBook display resolution as it would match the native ratio. In checking this out online it appears that the 1920 by 1200 display would not even be available to my MacBook under the up to date OS. All of this thinking surrounds the notion of avoiding any scaling by my 2018 13 inch MacBook. If it were possible to get a 1920 by 1200 ratio this is what I’d like to do.
If this would only result in my MacBook choosing a 1920 by 1080 ratio, perhaps there might be a better option.
I have read that there is a bad pixel range to avoid with monitors. That you want to either find a monitor around 110 or 210 pixels per inch. The 4K monitors would be within the bad range by default, but 2K monitors would be at the good range and not require any scaling. Then I’ve heard that scaling a 4K monitor is just fine as the Retina display would take over.
My question would be whether my pre M1/M2 monitor would take a performance hit by having to scale from 4K down to 1920 by 1080? I know that in my present situation that is exactly what is happening. Would it be beneficial to go with a 2K monitor and not having any scaling take place? I want to make sure I don’t have text too small, but if possible I’d like to remove any performance hit.
I believe the one thing that I can improve upon with whatever monitor that I purchase is by choosing a model with a quick DisplayPort.
Any thoughts on the best type monitor for my older MacBook?