Unacceptable monitor performance

[SteveSawyer]

I've been a new Mac user for a few months now (a 2014 Mac Mini) and while it's terribly slow when launching apps, it's pretty decent.

My only real gripe at this point (other than the fact that it comes out of "sleep" successfully only about 50% of the time! ) is the monitor I'm using. it's a 24" HD (1980 x 1024) display. Part of the problem is my work area has me quite close to this monitor. My nose is only 18" away from it. At that distance, the display is horrible. Very pixel-y and annoyingly difficult to read sometimes. I resisted having such a large monitor, but it seems that smaller monitors are becoming rather scarce. For the kind of work I do, the 24" could be great, if it was considerably sharper than what I'm staring at right now.

So my question is whether my only option is to go with a higher resolution monitor, say a QHD at 2560x1440? It appears that's the highest resolution I can go to without getting closer to 30". Would that be a significant improvement over what I'm using now? Also, I'm wondering if there is some aspect of display technology that improves the appearance of a 1980 x 1024 display that I should have been looking for before buying this monitor. TBH I know very little about display technology, so if this sounds like a stupid question...well...

Any comments/observations/suggestions welcomed! Thanks.

 

[krs]

I've been a new Mac user for a few months now (a 2014 Mac Mini) and while it's terribly slow when launching apps, it's pretty decent.

My only real gripe at this point (other than the fact that it comes out of "sleep" successfully only about 50% of the time! ) is the monitor I'm using. it's a 24" HD (1980 x 1024) display.

What make and model monitor do you have?
A 1980 x1024 resolution is rather unusual - normally I would expect it to be 1920 x 1080 (or 1920 x1200 for a 16x10 aspect ratio).
Does the Mac in System Preferences > Display show the 1980 x1024 resolution as default?

 

[SteveSawyer]

What make and model monitor do you have?
A 1980 x1024 resolution is rather unusual - normally I would expect it to be 1920 x 1080 (or 1920 x1200 for a 16x10 aspect ratio).
Does the Mac in System Preferences > Display show the 1980 x1024 resolution as default?

I'm sorry - yes, it's 1920 x 1080. I was making up numbers I guess...

It's an Asus VG248. And System Preferences > Display shows the default resolution as 1080p.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

A 1080P 24" monitor is a bad combination. 1080P is fine up to a 21" monitor and if on a larger monitor if you're sufficiently far back.

You should get a 2K monitor for something like 24-27" which will be a lot more crisper.

 

[pigoo3]

Part of the problem is my work area has me quite close to this monitor. My nose is only 18" away from it. At that distance, the display is horrible. Very pixel-y and annoyingly difficult to read sometimes.

If the 18" is an issue...and the issue is due to the work space...we really shouldn't blame the monitor (as indicated by thread title)..we should blame the workspace.

Here's a list of the 5 of the best 24"-25" displays currently available:

The 5 Best 24-25 Inch Monitors of 2025

If you aren't a gamer and need the best 24-inch monitor for productivity, check out the Dell P2423D, which is a good work monitor and has a 1440p resolution.

www.rtings.com

HTH,

Nick

 

[krs]

According to this calculator the 18-inch viewing distance for your 24 inch monitor should actually be OK

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I wonder if something else is going on.

 

[pm-r]

So my question is whether my only option is to go with a higher resolution monitor, say a QHD at 2560x1440?

Don't forget if you go with a display monitor with a very high resolution and run it at that resolution, it may be very clear and crisp but the font size can be so small it's bloody near impossible to read especially if your eyesight is getting bad.

BTW: have you tried changing your System Preferences > Displays to different resolution settings and see if things improve or not.

If you were thinking of changing your display, yet might be best to try different sized displays in a store at different resolutions, and you might even want to seriously consider visiting an optometrist and have your eyes checked and see if they have a recommendation for you for using a pair of special customized computer glasses.
They usually have anti-glare and maybe possibly color correcting treatments and often some magnification. Very similar to reading glasses.

But I would certainly agree with Nick, and get a better viewing arrangement regardless. You could end up wrecking your eyes if you continue with your current situation.



- Patrick
=======

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I've been a new Mac user for a few months now (a 2014 Mac Mini) and while it's terribly slow when launching apps, it's pretty decent.

My only real gripe at this point (other than the fact that it comes out of "sleep" successfully only about 50% of the time! ) is the monitor I'm using. it's a 24" HD (1980 x 1024) display. Part of the problem is my work area has me quite close to this monitor. My nose is only 18" away from it. At that distance, the display is horrible. Very pixel-y and annoyingly difficult to read sometimes.

I'm wondering if there is something wrong with your mini. A 2014 mini shouldn't be "terribly slow" to launch apps. And a 1080p monitor of only 24-inches should look acceptably nice, even very close up.

To help you, it would help to know things like how big your hard drive is, and how full it is. Whether you are running anti-virus software. What you have running on your mini in the way off startup items. Etc.

You may simply need to adjust your monitor or your mini's monitor settings. What are the settings for your monitor in System Preferences? How is your monitor attached to your mini?

Have a look at:

Macintosh Routine Maintenance

Macintosh Slowdown Solutions

 

[ferrarr]

This should make no difference, but what port are you using to connect the display to? HDMI or Thunderbolt?

My 2014 Mini died on me last month. I did install a 1TB SSD into it and it still performed very well, until it stopped working. Here is the step by step D-I-Y guide I used;

Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement

Use this guide to replace the hard drive in your hard-drive-only or Fusion Drive Mac mini Late 2014. This guide was made with a Fusion Drive Mac...

www.ifixit.com

 

[SteveSawyer]

Thanks all for the comments. Let's see if I can answer the questions.

First, yeah, if I had tons of space in my music room/office, I could do a deeper desk. Unfortunately, I'm pretty much maxed out now. However, if I get a new monitor I plan on putting it on a VESA mount to allow it to hang off the back of the desk which should put it a little further from my face. I switched to this Mac from a 17" Dell laptop which worked well for this space.

I'm running the monitor off of the HDMI port. I've played with re-scaling the display, and all that seems to do is make the text bigger, with no real improvement in the text quality. Max non-native resolution is 1600x900. Also wrt the smaller text at a higher resolution, I don't see that as a problem. The size of the text (and icons, and menus etc.) on this 24" 1080p monitor kinda feels like it's been drawn with crayons. Everything is much larger than it needs to be. As we've discussed, I'm sitting right on top of the darn thing! That's one of the indications to me that I should be running a higher-res monitor. At 24" as close as I am to it, everything really seems too large. The app icons and buttons and controls within apps could all be much smaller, and I could easily fit more stuff on the screen.

The screen shot attached below is 725 x 200 and represents what I'm looking at. The on-screen size of that when taken is about 8"x 2" Note that I have reading glasses in multiple diopters so I can wear the correct pair for the circumstances. I see an opthalmologist 4 times a year (I have two) and my corrected distance vision is good at 20/20.

I am running Malwarebytes. Nothing else loads at start-up. Everything seems to run fine once launched, even my DAW and the 3D design software I use. It just seems to take for-EV-er to launch an app. The HD is just that - an HD, not an SSD. 1TB, about 50% full though I moved a huge bunch of files to an external SSD, so once I empty the trash it will probably only be about 1/4 full. I've been thinking that maybe swapping the drive for an SSD would improve the performance.

Thanks again for all the comments. Screen shot below

 

[krs]

@Steve - Since you keep mentioning that the text you see is really too large, I'm wondering if you ended up in a magnified mode on the Mac.
To get back to the normal text hold down the Command key and select 0

 

[MacInWin]

I am running Malwarebytes.

Don't. Uninstall it. No need for it to be running all the time. In fact, a lot of us have moved on past it to run Intego Virusbarrier Scanner (free). It works well, doesn't "load" anything or any time.

With macOS there is no need for a resident antivirus or anti-malware product.

 

[pm-r]

I'm running the monitor off of the HDMI port. I've played with re-scaling the display, and all that seems to do is make the text bigger, with no real improvement in the text quality. Max non-native resolution is 1600x900. Also wrt the smaller text at a higher resolution, I don't see that as a problem. The size of the text (and icons, and menus etc.) on this 24" 1080p monitor kinda feels like it's been drawn with crayons.

Wow, that would be large even for my poor eyesight where I normally have to improve the font size, and I am guessing that the monitor you are using is a fairly cheap model as my wife's 24" iMac runs a native display of 1920 x 1080 which suits me fine, with an optional higher resolution of 2560 x 1440. The optional lower resolutions make the text just huge.

You really might want to think about getting a replacement and better monitor fairly soon and get that external SSD drive mounted internally as your boot drive replacement and use the HDD spinner as one of your external backup drives.

No need to suffer needlessly using your Mac.




- Patrick
=======

 

[SteveSawyer]

@Steve - Since you keep mentioning that the text you see is really too large, I'm wondering if you ended up in a magnified mode on the Mac.
To get back to the normal text hold down the Command key and select 0

Nope. Cmd+0 didn't make any changes. Plus, according to my hotkey cheat-sheet, that command (along with Cmd/+ and Cmd/-) only apply to browser zoom levels. IAC, that doesn't seem to be the problem.

 

[SteveSawyer]

Wow, that would be large even for my poor eyesight where I normally have to improve the font size, and I am guessing that the monitor you are using is a fairly cheap model as my wife's 24" iMac runs a native display of 1920 x 1080 which suits me fine, with an optional higher resolution of 2560 x 1440. The optional lower resolutions make the text just huge.

You really might want to think about getting a replacement and better monitor fairly soon and get that external SSD drive mounted internally as your boot drive replacement and use the HDD spinner as one of your external backup drives.

No need to suffer needlessly using your Mac.




- Patrick
=======

I don't know about "cheap" - Asus in my experience is usually decent product, and it set me back about $150 IIRC. Not super-high-end, but not bargain-basement either. And yeah, if I don't want to do the install myself, there is a Mac-authorized shop near me that will put a half-terabyte SSD in it for about $160. I've been thinking of doing that, then keeping the 1TB external SSD as well.

 

[krs]

Nope. Cmd+0 didn't make any changes. Plus, according to my hotkey cheat-sheet, that command (along with Cmd/+ and Cmd/-) only apply to browser zoom levels.

On Mojave, Cmd/+ and Cmd/- applies at least also to local Apple Mail and to Text Edit in addition to the browser, possibly more - I use that frequently

 

[pm-r]

On Mojave, Cmd/+ and Cmd/- applies at least also to local Apple Mail and to Text Edit in addition to the browser, possibly more - I use that frequently

Those same commands work all the way back to and including at least Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 with those Apple applications and the versions of Firefox and Google Chrome that I am using. Actually I think with all applications as far as I recall I haven't checked them all lately, but still use the commands fairly often to adjust for text size and readability.

I still find it hard to believe that a fairly recent display monitor of at least 10 years of age, would only have a maximum resolution available of 1600x900. That does not seem normal to me.
I agree with [B][COLOR=rgb(184, 49, 47)]krs[/COLOR][/B] that there is possibly some other adjustments somewhere, possibly under System Preferences > Adjustability overwriting the normal adjustment.




- Patrick
=======

 

[SteveSawyer]

I still find it hard to believe that a fairly recent display monitor of at least 10 years of age, would only have a maximum resolution available of 1600x900. That does not seem normal to me.
I agree with [B][COLOR=rgb(184, 49, 47)]krs[/COLOR][/B] that there is possibly some other adjustments somewhere, possibly under System Preferences > Adjustability overwriting the normal adjustment.

Oh, it will do 1920x1080 no problem. It was suggested that I play with different resolutions to see if it made any changes. 1600x900 is the highest resolution lower than the default 1920x1080 that's available.

I've played with a number of settings, including contrast. I also found that I can at least make the icons on my desktop smaller, which is nice. One of the worst displays on the system is in the menus. There appears to be some "backlighting" of the text presumably to make it more visible against the gray menu background, but at this low resolution it actually seems to be making things worse. (see the screenshot below).

I'll note that the viewing distance chart that @krs shared above indicates that the lower the resolution, the further away you need to sit from the monitor for acceptable viewing. That chart suggests for a 24" HD 1920x1080 monitor I should be sitting about 40" from it, not 18". That suggests to me that yeah, this monitor is either way too big, or much too low in it's resolution for this setup. Even a 4K 24" monitor (if there were such a thing) would be right at the edge of the minimum distance at 18".

I'm thinking that maybe I need to look for a smaller - 17" or 19" FHD monitor to overcome these problems, but man, the choices there are really limited...ugh. Going with a higher resolution is going to force me into an even larger monitor which is going to work against me so I'm likely to be chasing my tail. As someone pointed out above, it isn't the monitor that is performing poorly, it's my space!!

 

[pm-r]

Oh, it will do 1920x1080 no problem. It was suggested that I play with different resolutions to see if it made any changes. 1600x900 is the highest resolution lower than the default 1920x1080 that's available.

So call me confused... I thought part of your problem was everything was too large for you with the resolution set at 1600x900, and trying to view it at a distance 18 inches which to me is rather absurd.

If that is the case, what is your problem with running it at 1920x1080???

Please excuse my post if I'm way off base and not understanding your problem properly.

If you need other resolutions, maybe you should look at alternative software such as SwitchRezX.app that MAY be able to provide it, but I'm a bit reluctant to suggest using it in case you end up choosing a unsupported resolution and end up with a black screen that is very difficult to escape from.

Or maybe just take visit a computer store with a good selection of displays that you could try out at different resolutions, but do yourself a favor and lose that restricted 18 inch viewing distance. That's just crazy and I dare suggest unnecessary, even in a very cramped room. But please excuse my very blunt candid comments, but it would be nicer if you could enjoy your Mac viewing experience a bit better than you are currently doing so.




- Patrick
=======

 

[krs]

I'll note that the viewing distance chart that @krs shared above indicates that the lower the resolution, the further away you need to sit from the monitor for acceptable viewing. That chart suggests for a 24" HD 1920x1080 monitor I should be sitting about 40" from it, not 18".

You are looking at the Acuity distance which the calculator shows at 3.2 ft or 38 inches.
That's the theoretical distance you need from this type of display when the average eye can no longer distinguish individual pixels.
The normal viewing distance suggested for that display is shown at between 1.2 and 3.3 feet.

I use a 24 inch 16 x 10 Dell Ultra-sharp monitor with a viewing distance of roughly 26 inches and that works well for me.

If I were you, I would measure how far from the monitor you have to sit to be happy with the display (hopefully not the full 38 inches) and then see what the monitor options are based on a PPI value.