This only applies to RGB anti-aliasing (ClearType) which assumes a certain LCD color arrangement… and that arrangement is different for portrait vs. landscape.
For traditional greyscale anti-aliasing, that’s 100% unaffected by orientation.
The comment was, I think, about text.
As for non-text AA, is this typically baked into the OS, or developer/program-dependent? Is it something that Apple could universally turn off in iOS?
What do you mean? ClearType is for text, hence the word “text” in the title. It is simply RGB antialiasing vs. greyscale.
Other vector shapes may be antialiased I guess but Windows and OSX are damn far from being a bunch of vector shapes…
Did the reviewer have a nexus 9 or player to review or just the phone?
You’re trying to tell me that I can’t have 3.5 million pixels, a processor & gpu that are likely better than those of any other machine most people own in my pocket and a low price tag?
Want a non-massive phone? They’re still selling the 5. I also haven’t heard that they’re discontinuing the 7. I too wish there was a spec-bumped 2014 nexus 5 because IMO it’s the ideal size, but there isn’t so I’m just gonna have to deal with bigger. I also think it’s been widely missed by tech media that the phone has a footprint that’s only millimetres bigger than the iphone 6+ yet it has half an inch more screen.
The user experience of any flagship android phone these days is going to be good. The hardware has gotten powerful enough to manage everything and anything that the manufacturers put on there is easily mitigated by: buying a play store edition (i.e. unlocked, raw android), rooting your phone (there are always guides for the flagships) and flashing cyanogenmod or, for the less geeky, the 3rd party launchers are surprisingly good.
If you want top-end specs for mid-range price you should buy the OnePlus One [OPO]. At the moment its specs to price ratio can’t be beat.
I’m saying that I was responding to a comment about text anti-aliasing when I talked about subpixels, and I’m not aware of any text being anti-aliased by any modern OS except via subpixels—whether via ClearType on Windows or through other implementations on other OS’s. Grayscale anti-aliasing only seems to be deployed with graphics.
Lots of other things besides text are anti-aliased, such as all the icons, badges, notifications, and menu items in this bbs forum. I doubt that all instances of anti-aliasing in these contexts are achieved through manually-created bitmaps.
I don’t know how resolution independent OS X is right now, or how they handle scaling of icons and such between retina and non-retina displays. Conceivably they could be applying their own anti-aliasing to high-contrast, high-resolution sources.
I said that the ipad gets rid of the antialiasing. I was wrong.
I zoomed in four hundred percent-- lots of greys,
That’s… not correct at all. Apple to my knowledge never used RGB anti-aliasing (aka ClearType). They went retina instead, which is the longer term better solution, as ClearType assumes lower-res and fixed RGB arrays to work its 3x increased horizontal resolution magic.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20120303/cleartype-takes-a-back-seat-for-windows-8-metro/
Now in Windows 8, all elements of the Metro user interface including the Start screen, charms bar, first-party and third-party Metro-style applications use a more generic grey-scale anti-aliasing effect to smooth any text elements. (Of course, the Windows 8 Desktop and all desktop apps are unaffected for legacy purposes.)
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone who follows “Metro” because I’ve noticed this trend starting with the Zune desktop software which didn’t have ClearType either, followed by Windows Phone 7. Both of which use the grey-scale anti-aliasing we see in Windows 8 now.
Also true of IE10 and IE11.
See for yourself:
Left is Firefox, right is IE11. Left is RGB cleartype (old style), right is greyscale cleartype (new style). Zoom in as needed to see the RGB-ness …
Just barging in, completely oblivious to the conversation, to remark that it’s interesting how most flagship phones are now roughly as good as the iPhone but very few tablets manage to touch the iPad. That is all.
(what? not reading all that.)
That’s strange, since you yourself actually wrote about how Apple handles font smoothing (with references to OS X) in 2007:
And here is a screnshot of whoat Apple is doing in 10.10 Yosemite on non-retina displays like mine:
I should have limited my statement about OS’s use of subpixel rendering to those OS’s intended exclusively or near-exclusively for desktops, though, since I’ve already said how subpixel rendering is orientation-dependent.
That makes sense, since Metro UI is obviously designed for touch and to be used on tablets, where the more efficient sub-pixel rendering wouldn’t be possible in portrait mode. On Office, however, I believe sub-pixel rendering is still an option.
The question remains of how Apple handles anti-aliasing on retina-based Macs. @jerwin has clarified that iOS does greyscale AA—which is to be expected—but I suspect that retina machines running OSX continue to do subpixel rendering.
So this is clearly a program-specific implementation, and not a core OS implementation… or the OS API allows for both implementations. So it’s unclear whether what @jerwin is seeing on his iDevice is a result of Apple’s decisions or the application developer’s.
Somewhat surprisingly, it actually appears that Apple has used subpixel smoothing on retina-class iDevices when they’re in the appropriate orientation, though it’s possible they’ve eliminated this in recent versions of iOS.
AMENDED
OS X does use subixel rendering on retina displays, as this screenshot from the 5k iMac demonstrates:
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