Use a Mac with a Retina display for a week and see whether you don't notice a difference — and it's certainly nowhere near half the battery life. Everyone I know who's done this has never wanted to go back.
Well, the 13 inch Macbook Pro only has a QHD screen (2560x1600) at 227 PPI.
A 14 inch screen at QHD would still be 210 DPI.
A 4K (3840x2160) display at 14 inches is 315 PPI.
I have used retina Macbook screens for extended periods of time and increasing the DPI seems like overkill to me.
As someone who went from a mac (for the last 15 years including several retina MBPs) to a 1920x1080 13" screen on a lemur pro, I really don't find that it makes a huge difference to me. I thought it would really irritate me but it doesn't.
It's really noticable when reading/writing text. I personally do dev work for a living and when I have to use a FHD screen instead of a UHD screen it's really noticable.
It's kind of like going from 144Hz back to 60Hz when playing FPS games.
Based on lots of previous comments (and yours!) that describe a day/night difference, I've concluded this is highly personal.
Work issued me a 2018 Mac with a 2880x1800 15.4" display (220 dpi), and I work at home with it plugged into a 1920x1080 23.5" display (93 dpi) from Sceptre. They are side by side, all day long, and I vastly prefer writing and coding on the FHD display, to the point that I thought I was being trolled when I read comments about "never going back".
So, I'm guessing people just like different things!
Yeah, it must be. I much prefer using monitors at stock resolution, without scaling, for that sweet real-estate, rather than having pretty displays where I can't see pixels just so it's pretty. I had a retina MacBook for a while, it was very nice, but especially for dev work... I couldn't bring myself to care enough that I'd want a 4k screen (that I'd have to run at an effective 1080p anyway) vs just a 1440p monitor of the same size I can use without scaling.
