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For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. Th

For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. There are breadcrumbs for scaling in OS X that date back to Tiger or Leopard. This is one of the reasons why the iPhone4 straight up doubled the resolution even though it made for kind of a wacky display resolution (as opposed to 1024x600 or something more standard like that) Mountain Lion is supposed to finally get all that HighDPI stuff right though, according to the rumors. I'm only really familiar with the Apple side of things though, maybe Metro has similar design considerations in mind.

jamesbritt 14y ago
For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. Back in 2000 I was using 1920x1200 on a 12" laptop. I was running both WinXP and some version of Ubuntu, and they looked fine. Every since then I've had WUXGA screens and displays, until very recently when Dell and Lenovo decided to bail and move to the 1920x1080 short screens. It's a step backwards.
- CoolGuySteve 14y ago
  I think your definition of 'looked fine' is a lot different than Steve Jobs' and people who need bifocals. My guess is that your task bar in XP must have been less than a centimeter tall, the system font less than a millimeter tall. I know there are a lot of people like you who value having more on the screen like that, but realistically, that's not a very large market niche. The goal at Apple was to keep roughly the same dimensions for interface elements while increasing the sharpness of text and icons. If the user wanted to, they could reduce the font size in whatever application they were using to make practical use of the increased pixel density.