Yes, LCD subpixel rendering is a tangent, it’s not relevant to Alvy-Ray’s point. And again, LCD subpixel rendering is treating pixels as little squares; cutting a square pixel into 3 rectangles doesn’t change anything with respect to what Alvy Ray was talking about. So-called grayscale antialiasing on low-DPI displays is nearly as good as LCD subpixel, the quality differences are pretty minor. (Plus it’s a tradeoff and you get the downside of chromatic aberration.) I think you’re suggesting visual quality suffers when you don’t do any antialiasing at all, which is true, but that’s not what Alvy-Ray was talking about. Treating a pixel like a square does not imply lack of antialiasing.