9 ms·

MacBook Pro Retina Display Analysis

152 points by spathak 14y ago

chaz 14y ago
I buy a new MacBook Pro every year, and the dilemma here is similar to Anand's. I bought the high-resolution display on my current 15.4" MBP at 1680x1050. The resolution can be scaled to 1680x1050 or 1920x1200, but I'd like to know how blurry that is as opposed to native resolution. I've flipped my current MBP to 1440x852 to get a feel for the same effective real estate as the Retina Display's native resolution. Will try it out for a few days before pulling the trigger on upgrading.
- bitrot 14y ago
  Per the article, the new MBP actually renders at double the scaled resolution (so 3360x2100 for 1680x1050) and then downscales that to fit 2880x1800. (See the screenshots.) It shouldn't look blurry at all. In fact, it should look considerably better than a MBP with a 1680x1050 display.
  - tjoff 14y ago
    I don't know which screenshots you look at but there sure is blur when not dealing with apps that aware of the retina display, such as chrome (left) vs. safari (right): http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5998/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%208.21.29%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5998/Screen%20Shot%202012-0... In other words, it depends but it most certainly will have its share of issues, question is for how long.
    - bitrot 14y ago
      Yes, but that's not the kind of blurry at issue here.
    - jonhendry 14y ago
      I would probably look at apps other than Chrome. There's "unaware of the retina display", and there's "we eschewed native APIs to some extent and rolled our own implementations of stuff". I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome. I'm just saying it might not be wise to generalize from Chrome's appearance to retina-naive 3rd party apps in general.
      - lloeki 14y ago
        > I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome As part of its security model, Chrome does something akin to rendering everything offscreen in an unprivileged process then passing that to the user-facing process.
        jonhendry 14y ago
        Yeah, that sounds like it would do it. On the bright side, maybe they just have to double their offscreen buffer size.
        rbanffy 14y ago
        Actually, since it's 2D, they have to quadruple it.
  - jsvaughan 14y ago
    But using a scaled resolution "may affect performance" (understandably, of course, because each refresh now has to draw an enormous desktop and downscale it)
fredsted 14y ago
I was worried the Retinabook was only going to double the pixels. The ability to select a 1920x1200 "mode" is awesome.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  How is that more awesome than any other LCD monitor that is able to up-scale?
  - fredsted 14y ago
    It's not going to be blurry, because it's still 2800x1800, only scaled to match 1920x1200.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      Apparently it's actually rendered at 3840x2400 before being downscaled to 2880x1800.
  - chrisbroadfoot 14y ago
    Because it doesn't upscale, it downscales.
    - sigkill 14y ago
      Everytime someone makes such a comment, my mind is blown at how we already live in the future. Just a few weeks ago if someone would've told me that they're planning to _downscale_ to 1920x1200 on a _15"_ screen, on a portable computer I would've thought they were crazy.
      - FireBeyond 14y ago
        It's not that impressive, when you consider that Sony has let you select a 1920 resolution on some of their 13" laptops for over a year. Lest I be considered a nay-sayer, I'm going to be getting an MBP largely for the resolution boost.
seanalltogether 14y ago
"I really wish the $2199 SKU had the 512GB SSD, or at least offered it as an option - otherwise the spec is near perfect in my mind." Many of my colleagues agree. Slower cpu with 512GB at ~$2500 would be just about perfect.
- jaems33 14y ago
  Indeed. I think most pro's who would need a computer like this would want to get the 512GB option on the laptop just to secure themselves over the next few years, specifically because one can't upgrade the internal hard drive themselves like the old MacBook Pro. Though it's possible Apple figured that if they offered such option on the 'lower' model, most people wouldn't bother with the highest end because the processor bump is marginal.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  I was hoping for the 512 upgrade option too. In the keynote though he mentioned that a lot of pro users like to use external disks and with thunderbolt transfer rates will be very fast. That's probably their reasoning.
- spicyj 14y ago
  My guess is the SSD upgrade would have cost something like $500 and at that point it doesn't make sense to differentiate it from the higher-end model which also includes the new processor.
  - photojosh 14y ago
    Agreed. The OWC after-market SSD upgrades are $450 to go from 240 to 480GB. Apple isn't gouging on the SSD at least.
- skore 14y ago
  It is a typical strategy of Apple to slightly underspec desirable aspects of a product like hard drive capacity or RAM (...or ports - sigh). That way, they can release an updated version where those specs are bumped, resulting in a product that is perceived as significantly better instead of just slightly better in comparison to the previous model. I think it's also about using components that give you the largest gross margin - A slightly outdated model of a component will always be cheaper and more readily available than the cutting edge model - which further carries the risk of being less broadly tested. An in-between step is often to offer that option (like a larger SSD), but at significant additional cost. Particularly with things like RAM, apple sometimes charges you more than twice the regular market price: Getting a Mac Pro, for instance, you pay ~1k € extra when jumping from 6GB RAM to 32GB. Buying 32GB of RAM (yes, ECC and everything), sets you back 400€. Their SSD prices have gotten slightly more reasonable lately (buying the regular HDD option, selling that drive and buying your own SSD often saved you hundreds), although they're still a good bit off - especially considering that Apple buys OEM from Toshiba and in bulk. My personal conclusion is always to buy the bare minimum configuration and upgrade myself - I purchased a Macbook Pro 17" at the smallest configuration and added an SSD and an extra regular 1TB drive. Will probably add some RAM later this year. Had I gotten all that at Apple right away, I would probably have to pay 50% extra (although they don't even offer the option of exchanging the DVD Drive with an HDD).
ktizo 14y ago
Why are they faking the resolution? Is it that the graphics card has problems, or is it to make their own apps look nicer than competitors, or what? I hope they are not rescaling stuff like photoshop to something other than actual screen res, otherwise they will severely piss off graphics professionals even more than they managed with the Mac Pro workstation non-upgrade. [edit] reading through the article, it seems that they've either gone and broken the word 'resolution', or Anand is very confused. At 1440 x 900 you don't get any increase in desktop resolution compared to a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro, but everything is ridiculously crisp. I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.
- camwest 14y ago
  Because the UI is too small at the real resolution.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    UI can scale perfectly well without faking resolutions.
    - masklinn 14y ago
      > UI can scale perfectly I've yet to see any platform where this is the case.
      - jules 14y ago
        Windows 8 Metro, supposedly. They designed it to be either vector graphics or for bitmaps you have to supply multiple sizes. The largest size is chosen so that higher resolutions than that won't be neccesary because the human eye can't perceive it, so it will be future proof (at least that's what their marketing says).
        ryannielsen 14y ago
        FWIW, that's exactly the approach Apple has taken with both iOS and OS X. Some elements are rendered as vector graphics, most are rendered as bitmaps and the app provides a 1x and 2x bitmap.
dbecker 14y ago
I'm trying to determine whether the "75% less glare" claim means this is usable outside. Anyone seen feedback on this?
- solnyshok 14y ago
  also interested in this, but doubt it. It needs more brightness too.
PopaL 14y ago
The smart move now will be to wait 2-3 months before buying the Retina Display machine. I'm convinced that by the launch of Mountain Lion the OS will let you use the full resolution of the machine for UI, also it will give some time to other apps to upgrade their UI in order to support the new resolution. While the upgrade to Mountain Lion will be free, I have a funny feeling that Adobe will charge (or at least will try) you some extra money for an updated version of Photoshop for Retina Display MacBook Pro :). Any self respecting company or individual developer will probably provide a free upgrade for the UI of their applications soon in order to support the new resolution.
- darkstalker 14y ago
  Instead of giving you the real pixels with a DPI setting, they hide them and create the retina/non-retina modes for applications, so you have to pay for "retina-enabled" apps. A whole new way of sucking money out of apple users.
  - batista 14y ago
    Where you got that bizarro idea? You won't pay anything more. Pro Apple apps just got a free update to Retina-enabled, regular apps will get updated with Mountain Lion, and third party apps will also be updated for free. I don't think you understand what this high-DPI thing is meant to be and how it is supposed to work. Giving you the real pixels is not an option, because every asset of every app would have to be updated or look tiny and be unusable. It doesn't even make sense what you propose, because retina screens are meant to give extra detail for same sized elements, not merely extra pixels -- nobody needs 5MP in a 15", whereas the extra detail is easily appreciated.
    - cynix 14y ago
      > third party apps will also be updated for free. There's no guarantee that 3rd party developers will provide a free update. They could release Foo HD alongside their Foo app and make you buy it again.
- sigkill 14y ago
mortenjorck 14y ago
This is an advantage of hiDPI screens that hadn't quite clicked for me before - a throwback to one of the advantages of CRTs, allowing multiple resolutions to look good on a single display.
- anoother 14y ago
  While true, to an extent, it's also the case that resolutions other than native will require some kind of supersampling (eg. AA), unless they divide cleanly into native resolution - a problem CRTs never faced. This results in both blur (ngligible with a high enough resolution, but doesn't seem to be the case here, seeing the Safari vs Chrome comparison) and a performance hit.
  - dkordik 14y ago
    I get the impression that at every "resolution", we're really at the native retina resolution, but with UI widgets scaled to different levels, and different present-day resolutions reported to applications. Can anyone with one of these beauties confirm?
    - igul222 14y ago
      I can can confirm this is false- the resolutions really are different.
    - anoother 14y ago
      Yes, but this just amounts to scaling via the compositor and graphics stack (hardware-accellerated, of course), as opposed to being left to the 'screen' (post-GPU-hardware/firmware) as would be the case when actually driving a screen at non-native resolution. See the Safari/Chrome comparison in the article to see what this means in real terms...
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    True, and even CRTs had the issue that if you set a resolution that created interference in the shadow mask it would look like crap. There was a always a 'best' resolution to a CRT even if it was forgiving in terms of different settings. Given the 'free' GPU we get with machines these days (and by free I mean its always included) it seems reasonable to use its oversampling anti-aliasing feature for desktop display. I'm not sure why you wouldn't do that unless it was some sort of power issue.
Gring 14y ago
What happens if you span the desktop across the internal retina display and an external non-retina display and then move a window so that parts of it are on both displays? Is it just double size on the non-retina (which would be bad)? Or does it get drawn twice, in both resolutions, and each display gets their appropriate resolution (which would be preferable, but might be overly complex and taxing on the hardware)?
- thought_alarm 14y ago
  It appears correctly-sized on both displays, at least when I tried it in Lion a few months ago. It's an impressive effect. If you have Xcode and Quartz Debug you can enable HiDPI on any external monitor and try it out.
  - jonhendry 14y ago
    Also, if you have AirDisplay and a new Retina iPad, you can run the iPad as a HiDPI monitor. It'll be a little laggy, though, which probably won't be the case with a non-WiFi connection.
rbanffy 14y ago
I really don't like the approach of hiding the display's real pixel size. By now, we should have solved the problem of displaying GUIs with correctly sized elements at various resolutions. This approach only makes it more complicated to do it right in the future.
- glhaynes 14y ago
  What would be coming in the future, though, that we'd have to do it "right"? If this is good enough that people can't see pixels, do we ever need to go higher? Resolution seems like one of the few features that has a limit, so this "hack" may in fact be the most elegant and simplest solution for now and in the future.
  - anoother 14y ago
    Hopefully, it's the first step towards truly resolution-independent interfaces. Imagine differences in screen resolution being differences in quality, as opposed to scale. Of course there will need to be a lot of research into UI/UX to make the most of the opportunities. In a way, when referring to monitors, the word 'resolution' is in itself a misnomer, as we're not actually talking about density but instead about absolute pixel measurements.
    - glhaynes 14y ago
      Imagine differences in screen resolution being differences in quality, as opposed to scale. That's exactly what this is, though — the window decorations, for example, in OS X on the new MBP are identical in size to the ones on the "old" MBP, they're just more detailed. And since they're so detailed (hence "retina display" moniker) that most people won't be able to see any pixels at all and, since in just a few years, all displays will obviously be "retina displays", I think there's a strong argument to be made that resolution-independent interfaces aren't ever gonna happen and that that's not a bad thing at all. (They've been tried for years and they always end up a burden for the developer and/or not working well for the user.) The limitations of human biology make it so that this simple "hack" is actually the easiest for developers, works the best for users, and won't ever need to be replaced. … OK, yeah, one day we'll all have bionic eyes and we'll have to do the same doubling trick again, but presumably "Bionic-Retina Displays" will be cheap to produce by then. :)
nchlswu 14y ago
For creators, one of the reasons to own these devices is to create content for retina devices. I'm curious of Apple and Adobe have worked together to allow image documents to display at true resolution, within a scaled output? Does that make sense? I suppose what I'm saying is, working at a 100% canvas at 100% zoom level (instead of say, a 50% scale level) while all system elements are scaled. EDIT: This might not even matter, from a practical perspective.
- wmf 14y ago
  This is Adobe you're talking about. Wait for CS7 or CS8.
andyjsong 14y ago
Who makes the retina display? Samsung or LG?
- hyprsonic 14y ago
  samsung (source: ifixit article)
serge2k 14y ago
I'm torn between my complete refusal to buy all things Apple and the fact that I really want this. :(

152 points by spathak 14y ago

chaz 14y ago

I buy a new MacBook Pro every year, and the dilemma here is similar to Anand's. I bought the high-resolution display on my current 15.4" MBP at 1680x1050. The resolution can be scaled to 1680x1050 or 1920x1200, but I'd like to know how blurry that is as opposed to native resolution. I've flipped my current MBP to 1440x852 to get a feel for the same effective real estate as the Retina Display's native resolution. Will try it out for a few days before pulling the trigger on upgrading.

bitrot 14y ago
Per the article, the new MBP actually renders at double the scaled resolution (so 3360x2100 for 1680x1050) and then downscales that to fit 2880x1800. (See the screenshots.) It shouldn't look blurry at all. In fact, it should look considerably better than a MBP with a 1680x1050 display.
- tjoff 14y ago
  I don't know which screenshots you look at but there sure is blur when not dealing with apps that aware of the retina display, such as chrome (left) vs. safari (right): http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5998/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%208.21.29%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5998/Screen%20Shot%202012-0... In other words, it depends but it most certainly will have its share of issues, question is for how long.
  - bitrot 14y ago
    Yes, but that's not the kind of blurry at issue here.
  - jonhendry 14y ago
    I would probably look at apps other than Chrome. There's "unaware of the retina display", and there's "we eschewed native APIs to some extent and rolled our own implementations of stuff". I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome. I'm just saying it might not be wise to generalize from Chrome's appearance to retina-naive 3rd party apps in general.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      > I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome As part of its security model, Chrome does something akin to rendering everything offscreen in an unprivileged process then passing that to the user-facing process.
      - jonhendry 14y ago
        Yeah, that sounds like it would do it. On the bright side, maybe they just have to double their offscreen buffer size.
        rbanffy 14y ago
        Actually, since it's 2D, they have to quadruple it.
- jsvaughan 14y ago
  But using a scaled resolution "may affect performance" (understandably, of course, because each refresh now has to draw an enormous desktop and downscale it)

fredsted 14y ago

I was worried the Retinabook was only going to double the pixels. The ability to select a 1920x1200 "mode" is awesome.

cheatercheater 14y ago
How is that more awesome than any other LCD monitor that is able to up-scale?
- fredsted 14y ago
  It's not going to be blurry, because it's still 2800x1800, only scaled to match 1920x1200.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    Apparently it's actually rendered at 3840x2400 before being downscaled to 2880x1800.
- chrisbroadfoot 14y ago
  Because it doesn't upscale, it downscales.
  - sigkill 14y ago
    Everytime someone makes such a comment, my mind is blown at how we already live in the future. Just a few weeks ago if someone would've told me that they're planning to _downscale_ to 1920x1200 on a _15"_ screen, on a portable computer I would've thought they were crazy.
    - FireBeyond 14y ago
      It's not that impressive, when you consider that Sony has let you select a 1920 resolution on some of their 13" laptops for over a year. Lest I be considered a nay-sayer, I'm going to be getting an MBP largely for the resolution boost.

seanalltogether 14y ago

"I really wish the $2199 SKU had the 512GB SSD, or at least offered it as an option - otherwise the spec is near perfect in my mind." Many of my colleagues agree. Slower cpu with 512GB at ~$2500 would be just about perfect.

jaems33 14y ago
Indeed. I think most pro's who would need a computer like this would want to get the 512GB option on the laptop just to secure themselves over the next few years, specifically because one can't upgrade the internal hard drive themselves like the old MacBook Pro. Though it's possible Apple figured that if they offered such option on the 'lower' model, most people wouldn't bother with the highest end because the processor bump is marginal.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I was hoping for the 512 upgrade option too. In the keynote though he mentioned that a lot of pro users like to use external disks and with thunderbolt transfer rates will be very fast. That's probably their reasoning.
spicyj 14y ago
My guess is the SSD upgrade would have cost something like $500 and at that point it doesn't make sense to differentiate it from the higher-end model which also includes the new processor.
- photojosh 14y ago
  Agreed. The OWC after-market SSD upgrades are $450 to go from 240 to 480GB. Apple isn't gouging on the SSD at least.
skore 14y ago
It is a typical strategy of Apple to slightly underspec desirable aspects of a product like hard drive capacity or RAM (...or ports - sigh). That way, they can release an updated version where those specs are bumped, resulting in a product that is perceived as significantly better instead of just slightly better in comparison to the previous model. I think it's also about using components that give you the largest gross margin - A slightly outdated model of a component will always be cheaper and more readily available than the cutting edge model - which further carries the risk of being less broadly tested. An in-between step is often to offer that option (like a larger SSD), but at significant additional cost. Particularly with things like RAM, apple sometimes charges you more than twice the regular market price: Getting a Mac Pro, for instance, you pay ~1k € extra when jumping from 6GB RAM to 32GB. Buying 32GB of RAM (yes, ECC and everything), sets you back 400€. Their SSD prices have gotten slightly more reasonable lately (buying the regular HDD option, selling that drive and buying your own SSD often saved you hundreds), although they're still a good bit off - especially considering that Apple buys OEM from Toshiba and in bulk. My personal conclusion is always to buy the bare minimum configuration and upgrade myself - I purchased a Macbook Pro 17" at the smallest configuration and added an SSD and an extra regular 1TB drive. Will probably add some RAM later this year. Had I gotten all that at Apple right away, I would probably have to pay 50% extra (although they don't even offer the option of exchanging the DVD Drive with an HDD).

ktizo 14y ago

Why are they faking the resolution? Is it that the graphics card has problems, or is it to make their own apps look nicer than competitors, or what? I hope they are not rescaling stuff like photoshop to something other than actual screen res, otherwise they will severely piss off graphics professionals even more than they managed with the Mac Pro workstation non-upgrade. [edit] reading through the article, it seems that they've either gone and broken the word 'resolution', or Anand is very confused. At 1440 x 900 you don't get any increase in desktop resolution compared to a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro, but everything is ridiculously crisp. I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.

camwest 14y ago
Because the UI is too small at the real resolution.
- ktizo 14y ago
  UI can scale perfectly well without faking resolutions.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > UI can scale perfectly I've yet to see any platform where this is the case.
    - jules 14y ago
      Windows 8 Metro, supposedly. They designed it to be either vector graphics or for bitmaps you have to supply multiple sizes. The largest size is chosen so that higher resolutions than that won't be neccesary because the human eye can't perceive it, so it will be future proof (at least that's what their marketing says).
      - ryannielsen 14y ago
        FWIW, that's exactly the approach Apple has taken with both iOS and OS X. Some elements are rendered as vector graphics, most are rendered as bitmaps and the app provides a 1x and 2x bitmap.

dbecker 14y ago

I'm trying to determine whether the "75% less glare" claim means this is usable outside. Anyone seen feedback on this?

solnyshok 14y ago
also interested in this, but doubt it. It needs more brightness too.

PopaL 14y ago

The smart move now will be to wait 2-3 months before buying the Retina Display machine. I'm convinced that by the launch of Mountain Lion the OS will let you use the full resolution of the machine for UI, also it will give some time to other apps to upgrade their UI in order to support the new resolution. While the upgrade to Mountain Lion will be free, I have a funny feeling that Adobe will charge (or at least will try) you some extra money for an updated version of Photoshop for Retina Display MacBook Pro :). Any self respecting company or individual developer will probably provide a free upgrade for the UI of their applications soon in order to support the new resolution.

darkstalker 14y ago
Instead of giving you the real pixels with a DPI setting, they hide them and create the retina/non-retina modes for applications, so you have to pay for "retina-enabled" apps. A whole new way of sucking money out of apple users.
- batista 14y ago
  Where you got that bizarro idea? You won't pay anything more. Pro Apple apps just got a free update to Retina-enabled, regular apps will get updated with Mountain Lion, and third party apps will also be updated for free. I don't think you understand what this high-DPI thing is meant to be and how it is supposed to work. Giving you the real pixels is not an option, because every asset of every app would have to be updated or look tiny and be unusable. It doesn't even make sense what you propose, because retina screens are meant to give extra detail for same sized elements, not merely extra pixels -- nobody needs 5MP in a 15", whereas the extra detail is easily appreciated.
  - cynix 14y ago
    > third party apps will also be updated for free. There's no guarantee that 3rd party developers will provide a free update. They could release Foo HD alongside their Foo app and make you buy it again.
sigkill 14y ago

mortenjorck 14y ago

This is an advantage of hiDPI screens that hadn't quite clicked for me before - a throwback to one of the advantages of CRTs, allowing multiple resolutions to look good on a single display.

anoother 14y ago
While true, to an extent, it's also the case that resolutions other than native will require some kind of supersampling (eg. AA), unless they divide cleanly into native resolution - a problem CRTs never faced. This results in both blur (ngligible with a high enough resolution, but doesn't seem to be the case here, seeing the Safari vs Chrome comparison) and a performance hit.
- dkordik 14y ago
  I get the impression that at every "resolution", we're really at the native retina resolution, but with UI widgets scaled to different levels, and different present-day resolutions reported to applications. Can anyone with one of these beauties confirm?
  - igul222 14y ago
    I can can confirm this is false- the resolutions really are different.
  - anoother 14y ago
    Yes, but this just amounts to scaling via the compositor and graphics stack (hardware-accellerated, of course), as opposed to being left to the 'screen' (post-GPU-hardware/firmware) as would be the case when actually driving a screen at non-native resolution. See the Safari/Chrome comparison in the article to see what this means in real terms...
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  True, and even CRTs had the issue that if you set a resolution that created interference in the shadow mask it would look like crap. There was a always a 'best' resolution to a CRT even if it was forgiving in terms of different settings. Given the 'free' GPU we get with machines these days (and by free I mean its always included) it seems reasonable to use its oversampling anti-aliasing feature for desktop display. I'm not sure why you wouldn't do that unless it was some sort of power issue.

Gring 14y ago

What happens if you span the desktop across the internal retina display and an external non-retina display and then move a window so that parts of it are on both displays? Is it just double size on the non-retina (which would be bad)? Or does it get drawn twice, in both resolutions, and each display gets their appropriate resolution (which would be preferable, but might be overly complex and taxing on the hardware)?

thought_alarm 14y ago
It appears correctly-sized on both displays, at least when I tried it in Lion a few months ago. It's an impressive effect. If you have Xcode and Quartz Debug you can enable HiDPI on any external monitor and try it out.
- jonhendry 14y ago
  Also, if you have AirDisplay and a new Retina iPad, you can run the iPad as a HiDPI monitor. It'll be a little laggy, though, which probably won't be the case with a non-WiFi connection.

rbanffy 14y ago

I really don't like the approach of hiding the display's real pixel size. By now, we should have solved the problem of displaying GUIs with correctly sized elements at various resolutions. This approach only makes it more complicated to do it right in the future.

glhaynes 14y ago
What would be coming in the future, though, that we'd have to do it "right"? If this is good enough that people can't see pixels, do we ever need to go higher? Resolution seems like one of the few features that has a limit, so this "hack" may in fact be the most elegant and simplest solution for now and in the future.
- anoother 14y ago
  Hopefully, it's the first step towards truly resolution-independent interfaces. Imagine differences in screen resolution being differences in quality, as opposed to scale. Of course there will need to be a lot of research into UI/UX to make the most of the opportunities. In a way, when referring to monitors, the word 'resolution' is in itself a misnomer, as we're not actually talking about density but instead about absolute pixel measurements.
  - glhaynes 14y ago
    Imagine differences in screen resolution being differences in quality, as opposed to scale. That's exactly what this is, though — the window decorations, for example, in OS X on the new MBP are identical in size to the ones on the "old" MBP, they're just more detailed. And since they're so detailed (hence "retina display" moniker) that most people won't be able to see any pixels at all and, since in just a few years, all displays will obviously be "retina displays", I think there's a strong argument to be made that resolution-independent interfaces aren't ever gonna happen and that that's not a bad thing at all. (They've been tried for years and they always end up a burden for the developer and/or not working well for the user.) The limitations of human biology make it so that this simple "hack" is actually the easiest for developers, works the best for users, and won't ever need to be replaced. … OK, yeah, one day we'll all have bionic eyes and we'll have to do the same doubling trick again, but presumably "Bionic-Retina Displays" will be cheap to produce by then. :)

nchlswu 14y ago

For creators, one of the reasons to own these devices is to create content for retina devices. I'm curious of Apple and Adobe have worked together to allow image documents to display at true resolution, within a scaled output? Does that make sense? I suppose what I'm saying is, working at a 100% canvas at 100% zoom level (instead of say, a 50% scale level) while all system elements are scaled. EDIT: This might not even matter, from a practical perspective.

wmf 14y ago
This is Adobe you're talking about. Wait for CS7 or CS8.

andyjsong 14y ago

Who makes the retina display? Samsung or LG?

hyprsonic 14y ago
samsung (source: ifixit article)

serge2k 14y ago

I'm torn between my complete refusal to buy all things Apple and the fact that I really want this. :(