If it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
I said “good enough,” which is not quite the same as “good.” They’re usable.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
It would be a new category of device in the sense that a significant amount of current device owners will have a very good reason to upgrade and in the case of portable computers and tablets it would change completely how and where they are used. I think that's the main concern of the original question: What next great thing could Apple release to make an additional ton of money again?
If you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkEa1ZttTxg
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.