Reading through the comments proves different strokes for different folks.
It took me quite a while to find a laptop I'm completely happy with. I ended up with a (late-2019) Razer Blade Stealth (with gtx1650). I do run the internal screen at 1080p (at 100%) and I couldn't imagine running it at 4k. My older 13" macbook has higher resolution, but you end up having to scale it anyway (In reality, I think it's actually doubled, then scaled back). On a 13", a good quality 1080p screen (to me) is the way to go - anything higher needs scaled.
I really don't understand why there are so few QHD screens on laptops. It's always either a 1080p or 4k, while a good QHD screen would still give higher resolution while not completely murdering my battery.
Yeah, I've got a 4K Thinkpad, and the screen is gorgeous, but it's way overkill. QHD would have been good enough, but it was 4K or 1080p, and I do want a bit more than that.
Mac makes most apps "just work", but it has issues: Any scaling besides the default makes it impossible to do 1:1 device pixel rendering from within an app.
Windows has the complete solution for non-integer pixel ratios. For instance, on this machine, my browser's window.devicePixelRatio is `1.7647058823529411`. For my 4k screen, this means apps should be rendering into 3840x2160 pixels, but scale it /as if/ it were a 2176x1224 display. (2160/devicePixelRatio = 1224.0)
This allows Windows apps to handle non-integer scaling, whereas on Mac this causes apps to get "fuzzy", since they would e.g. render into a 2176x1224 screenbuffer which is upscaled to 4k by the OS compositor.
Do you not? My work laptop has very high DPI, and I hate all the scaling issues I encounter with all the corporate software I have to use. To the point that I much prefer to plug it into a 1080p monitor.
Windows relies too much on legacy software. The built in RDP client for example fails when you remote from a high DPI machine to a windows server that doesn’t support high DPI. Microsoft’s own RDP client on Mac upscales perfectly.
Adobe Apps on Windows are terrible for this. All screen recording apps on Windows have problems if your internal monitor and external monitor have different scaling as well.
It took me quite a while to find a laptop I'm completely happy with. I ended up with a (late-2019) Razer Blade Stealth (with gtx1650). I do run the internal screen at 1080p (at 100%) and I couldn't imagine running it at 4k. My older 13" macbook has higher resolution, but you end up having to scale it anyway (In reality, I think it's actually doubled, then scaled back). On a 13", a good quality 1080p screen (to me) is the way to go - anything higher needs scaled.