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>>It's called a MacBook Pro and is marketed at more demanding users, i.e. professionals

Which "professionals"? 8bit color is important to pretty much one professional group: graphic artists/designers (maybe two, if you include people doing video work). For the vast majority of people - "professional" or otherwise - 6bit vs. 8bit color doesn't matter. It looks good, it's fast, it runs what they want. Those are the things that matter.

As a developer, I consider myself a "professional", and my life is fine with 6bit color. My roommate is a screenwriting "professional" and they're fine with 6bit color. Presumably an 8bit color display would cost more, and hence would reduce the number of people who could afford the machine, at the expense of pleasing one small market segment.

Bottom line is that if a feature (any feature) was important enough for me that it would make or break my decision to buy the underlying system, I'd explicitly confirm its existence (in a way more rigorous than "millions and millions", which sounds like marketing-speak), and I'd get reviews from my peers who would have the same interests. In this case, the author did neither.

At the minimum, it's faulty marketing on Apple's product. They shouldn't state that it supports millions of colors when it actually doesn't. Just like the CRT monitors that are 17" but only 15" viewable... sometimes that stuff doesn't change until someone files a lawsuit.

It "supports" millions of colors; it just displays some of them with multiple pixel tricks. Which is probably fine with me -- I haven't seen a comparison where I could tell the difference without blowing the pixels up.

Thats the least compelling definition of supports millions of colours I've ever heard. So did my EGA display adapter in the 80s then. I'd be furious if I bought a 6-bit monitor in this day and age and it wasn't spelled in giant letters all over the thing.

You must be furious pretty often, then - because the vast majority of LCDs sold today, with the exception of a few expensive high-end displays, use 6-bit color.

(This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)

The difference leaps out at you if you've done any sort of colour work at all. I can even see in the gradients on the Finder window toolbars.

This probably means that you have a defective display. I have a 17" MacBook Pro that has this kind of defect, where I can see bad gradients, etc. However, three other Macs in our possession doesn't have this issue.

I agree. Most people don't know how LCDs work, don't know what dithering is, and wouldn't know what 6bit or 8bit meant if their life depended on it. To these - the majority - of people, "millions of colors" is "millions of colors", and any losses by dithering be damned.

They would ask "if I looked at my monitor, could it show me 'millions of colors'?" to which the one-word answer is "yes". If you had some time, you could expand it to be "yes, but the majority of those are done by this process called dithering, which is when..." and the person you're talking to has lost interest and/or gotten confused. To them, color is color, and they don't care about dithering since it's not visible to them.

This is who marketing is designed for. When most people here see an ad for a system, they immediately skip all the marketing bits and go to the stats, and from that get a good mental idea about the performance of the system, where the bottlenecks will be, etc. When "average" people see an ad for a system they look at the ad copy that says "will launch Word in half the time", decide that that's what they need, and buy the thing.

Ad copy caters to, and explains in context for, the lowest common denominator. If you're not that, then you should be looking elsewhere (at the fine print, the stats, the asterisk at the bottom of the page, etc.) to draw your own conclusions.

This is absolutely not true. The difference between the screen on the 13" and the 15" MacBook Pro is enormous. The text is far sharper on the 15", and that matters hugely to developers. It matters to anyone who reads text.

When you use dithering/pixel tricks to fake color depth, everything turns slightly fuzzy and washed out. Even black is affected. It really begins to affect the way things look and feel on the screen.

Oh come on. I've been using laptops for 15 years, and all of the screens have been fine for programming work. (even the monochrome ones) The 6-bit display on my MacBook is clearer and crisper than the machine I had before that, and that machine was better than the one before it. Yes, it's not a patch on my twin Dell 2408WFP's (which are 8-bit), but so what?! It's not "fuzzy and washed out" by comparison - that's a ridiculously hyperbolic statement! No, I don't do colour-accurate work on my laptop, and nor would I expect to.

I do agree with the sentiment that it is disingenuous of Apple (and almost everyone else in the industry) not to list the bit depth of their displays, though.

The differences in screen quality between the 13" and 15" MacBook Pro are not because of 6-bit vs 8-bit panels. All MacBook Pros ever made have only used 6-bit panels. The 15" just uses a higher quality 6-bit panel.

Apple advertises it as being able to display millions of colors despite the fact that it really only displays 262,144.

A 6-bit display is capable of displaying more than 6 bits of color information, using a technique named temporal dithering. For an example, open this image on a 6-bit display: < http://imgur.com/BeVicl.png >. If the display could only display 262k colors, the squares would look identical.

Thank you, as this puts paid to anyone here saying there's no visible difference except to pixel peepers.

(Well, assuming one is comparing on a true 8 bit screen.)

Please note that the 6-bit image is not what will be present on an Apple screen. The difference between 8-bit and dithered 6-bit is difficult to notice for most people.

Is there a way to test if you have a 6 bit monitor?

Easiest way: Look up the monitor's serial number online, and see if it's 6- or 8-bit.

It will look identical assuming the 262k colors monitor reduces the gammut using the same method used for that image.

He seemed to have very specific requirements, doing a bit of research isn't out of the question. I knew about the color situation (and don't care!), it has been well publicized.

A class action law suit about this issue was filed last year, it's not exactly breaking news.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11348

they're clearly skimping on parts

This is not clear at all. Every manufacturer uses 6-bit displays, even in most if not all high-end models. This has been true for years. They choose to do so because such displays have desirable properties other than color, such as price and lower response times.