8 ms·

Pixel Perfect

143 points by olivercameron 14y ago

FrankBooth 14y ago
Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-end desktop. Compared to a high-end desktop which has barely seen updates since 2010, and includes a GPU released in 2009, sure.
- harpastum 14y ago
  The point being made was that it is a desktop-class machine. Generally, laptops have always been convenience and portability, and desktops have had power and price point. Obviously there are exceptions to any rule, but in this case, the display is actually better than any desktop I've seen, and the SSD and CPU/GPU give it all the power necessary for 95% of users. The price point is definitely high, but otherwise it seems best of both worlds.
  - lmm 14y ago
    You've always been able to get a laptop that was as good as the desktops of 2-3 years ago, and never one that's as good as the current ones. Saying "desktop-class" is a nonsense; this is no different from previous efforts. Now, if you're saying we've reached the point where the extra CPU etc. of a desktop are not worth it for most users, then I agree with you. But again that's nothing specific to the macbook air; any modern laptop will have the same properties.
msutherl 14y ago
I've recently been studying typography and it's been really heartbreaking to realize that what differentiates a good and a bad typeface onscreen is how it well it renders. Plenty of great typefaces are just unusable. Most fonts distort wildly as you step up/down in pixel size. I didn't start in print design, but man is web design primitive in comparison!
- evoxed 14y ago
  I have to admit that rage was starting to burn inside of me until I read your last sentence– that's one of the reasons why I take so few jobs for the web these days. I always thought that web technologies would far surpass what we could do in print (which, as a lead type junkie, sounded pretty amazing) and then I grew up, started dealing with W3C &c;– now here we are, only in the last two years or so getting a reliable (and compliant) way of using more than just Times, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, &c... It's slow, slow progress but it's great to see that while those issues are hashing themselves out that the pixel problem is practically resolved. (Though I should note that pixels or not, setting a spread to be displayed digitally was never that much of a problem if it didn't have to be displayed in the browser. Sure, some fonts have shitty hinting but the ball is at least in your court.)
cmelbye 14y ago
I totally agree about the Lucida Grande thing. It's weird seeing fonts like Lucida Grande and Verdana on such a nice display.
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  The Retina MPB has opened up a whole world of fonts. It's amazing how much attention I pay to them when I visit websites now. There is a downside to such a nice screen -- it makes me painfully OCD. On my previous laptop, the screen was such crap that it didn't bother me. On this one, I notice every subtle flaw. For instance, image retention (which I'm now convinced that after swapping three of these things out eventually affects all of the LG panels used in the MBPR [Samsung panels do not seem to have the issue]). Then there's the fact that it's just slightly not bright enough for my liking. I find myself hitting the brighten button a lot when it is at max. No matter that my old laptop looks downright dim next to this. And despite the fact that it is an IPS display, the colors do change quite a bit with viewing angle. A solid white screen kind of shimmers in luminance and tint when moving my head. And the black level isn't pure black. And 220ppi isn't quite enough to complete the no-pixel illusion for me. And the color gamut could be a smidge greater. It's like the uncanny valley of screens. It's so close to perfect, but not quite there, that it leaves me paying a weird amount of attention to it. But I wouldn't trade it for any other.
cageface 14y ago
Color me surprised to read another frothing fluff piece for an Apple product from arch-apparatchik Gruber. Doubling the display density of a laptop screen qualifies Apple for the Nobel Peace prize now, or something.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  I'm not sure what your critique is. He's not a politician or TV host getting paid by the bad Apple to write/say nice lies about them... He writes about Apple, and people visit his website to read what he writes. It's that simple. If you disagree with any of his points, please post them in this topic. But don't go dismissing it just because it's from arch-apparatchik Gruber.
  - cageface 14y ago
    As he himself has written on his blog, in exchange for this kind of PR he gets invited to private meetings inside Apple.
    - arrrg 14y ago
      Does he? What are you referring to? The Mountain Lion presentation? Apple invited loads of journalists to that, they just also included Gruber there.
      - cageface 14y ago
        http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR.
        arrrg 14y ago
        Sure. And? What’s your point? Apple met separately with loads of journalists. I don’t see anything special about how they treated Gruber.
reitzensteinm 14y ago
> Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-end desktop. It helps if that high end desktop hasn't been updated in two years. For CPU performance, laptops lagging a couple of years behind desktops is more or less business as usual.
- lloeki 14y ago
  Still, we're talking about a Xeon here, not your typical desktop-variant Core Something. It was a powerhouse.
  - reitzensteinm 14y ago
    The benchmarks were lightly threaded, for which Xeons basically offer no advantage - they let you have more cores in a machine, and that's about all. For rendering and encoding, the 12 core 2010 Mac Pros would still slaughter a retina MBP. No competition. There are many impressive things about the retina MBP, but CPU performance is not one of them.
    - Synaesthesia 14y ago
      I would say the CPU performance is very impressive, sure a 12 core will beat it at rendering, but the single threaded performance is amazing, and the super fast SSD makes it basically the fastest Mac ever in general usage.
- muro 14y ago
  Even worse, it's 4 years for GPUs.
SCdF 14y ago
So more pixels is great. Is it really that great? I feel like there are people who look at their devices and people who look at what's displayed on their devices. For me, text is text is text. I'm looking at it, not so I can enjoy how crisp it is (or isn't), but so I can consume those words and get them inside my head. I find (I've played around with high DPI devices) that while they do look nice, the niceness is quickly forgotten when I actually start using them for something other than looking at how nice they look. Likewise, going back to use lower DPI devices you notice the difference, until you stop looking for it and actually get work done. I'm not saying that I don't care entirely, I just... I wouldn't go and buy a new device solely because its resolution was higher. It will be nice when these devices eventually make it to me, but I'm not really bothered either way. If we were to talk about recent revolutions in the home computer I'd rank multi-core CPUs as a much more important change. No longer can one broken app go on a rampage and block you out. Anyway, tl;dr; it's great he's passionate about it, I just don't see it as such as important thing.
- cageface 14y ago
  I have an iPad 3 and an iPad 2. The "retina" display is certainly a nice upgrade but it's hardly essential. This is obviously where the industry has been heading for a while and the only thing interesting about it here is that Apple's supply chain dynamics makes it possible for them to get 6-12 months ahead of the competition.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    Some text looks like crap on the old screen (iPad 1), with visible aliasing and color fringes - making zooming absolutely required for reading. Not so with the retina display.
- msutherl 14y ago
  Some people make a point of appreciating the small joys of life. Others do not. Much effort and attention is lost on the latter.
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evoxed 14y ago
So, here's a question for those who actually have one of these mega-res displays... how's the terminal? Or any other typically aliased text? Secondly, how well does it work in a dual/2+ boot situation? Obviously other systems have the drivers for such large displays, but without knowing how to scale it... Is there any way to set the hardware to simply enlarge everything x2 in the absence of serious display drivers (for example, a desktopless linux or bsd)?
- nilium 14y ago
  re: A terminal: probably fine, albeit small. Running at 2880x1800 without any scaling isn't terrible, but it would quickly drive your eyes to escape your skull. I can't say for sure what would happen under Linux given only a terminal, but I imagine things would be pretty small until you got it using a different resolution than the native resolution. Terminal emulators are fine, but I assumed you meant the other kind. Terminal emulators look great, as does every text editor I've used (MacVim, vim in a terminal emulator, Sublime Text 2, TextMate 2, Xcode [looks great, but it's unfortunately still a lousy IDE], etc.). re: Dual boot, also fine in my case, though I only keep Mac OS and Windows 7 installed right now. Windows 7 in particular is an issue, as DPI scaling only affects some programs (so where on Mac OS you'd get pixel-doubled views or text, on Windows you get windows that aren't scaled at all, such as Chrome). If you have dual monitors, Windows is particularly painful, as DPI scaling is system-wide rather than per-screen. I haven't tested Windows 8 and likely won't until after it's been released. The best route I've found is to simply set the display to 1920x1200 or lower and scale it up on Windows. Windows 7 just doesn't handle high resolution stuff particularly well -- it's not bad, but things just aren't all there. I expect Windows 8 will be better. I couldn't say what your options are on a desktopless Linux/BSD system, but I would imagine that there's something you could do, even if that something is just using a larger font.
- deleted 14y ago
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andrewfelix 14y ago
One thing that I've noticed as pixel density is increasing, is many 3rd party UI elements aren't increasing in size relative to monitor improvements. I remember using Photoshop on my old LC475 in the 90's and not having to squint and hold the mouse steady to select the tool I wanted. Please tell me someone else has noticed this? Or am I just getting old.
- cshesse 14y ago
  Monitor pixel densities haven't increased that much, they've been limited by having to keep interface elements visible. It's only easy for apple because they just doubled the density in both directions. Any intermediate numbers of pixels would have impacted usability.
jcampbell1 14y ago
I find it quite surprising that the author is so passionate about typefaces, but serves his own blog in Verdana. Good thing it is not called JaringJireJall.net [1] That being said, I really think the days of sans fonts are close to over. 10 years from now, we will all be reading on 300 dpi screens and taste in typography will return to being the dominate feature of design. I can't wait until I can read the Economist online in the correct typeface. I can walk down an airplane isle and recognize that font in less than a second. The New Yorker also uses a font that seems to be unique. The Atlantic needs a custom typeface. I am so excited that high DPI screens are going to be the norm. The web design world as we know it today is about shitty flourishing with artwork. 10 years from now it will be about designing beautiful glyphs that represent the brand. [1] J is particularly gross in Verdana.
- jmduke 14y ago
  I'm interested in this. As someone who doesn't pay that much attention to typography (beyond the obvious 'Papyrus is bad' stuff) what makes individual typefaces preferable over a standard typeface for all similarly structured content? (Besides branding, that is.)
  - sbierwagen 14y ago
    It's pure marketing. There's no objective, measurable difference.
    - LoganCale 14y ago
      Yes there is. Certain typefaces are objectively easier to read than others, and some work better for certain content than others. Some are best for body text, some are best for headlines, etc. Some are optimized for low resolution screens, some for print (and as such work well on high resolution screens).
      - delackner 14y ago
        A great recent example that appeared on HN was the typeface designed for road signs, which the designers then put through Germany(?)'s test suite for legibility at distance in various road conditions and determined the new font was objectively legible at greater distance than all previous standard road-sign fonts with which it was compared. [By request, I found the original article: http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage-typeface/ http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag... ]
jmitcheson 14y ago
It's a shame Google Chrome still doesn't render CSS3 fonts correctly on Windows. The strangest thing about it is that they barely even seem to acknowledge that it's an issue. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-rendering-of-font-face-in-chrome http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-renderin... If you've noticed that web fonts look terrible on Windows / Chrome, please star these issues! http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371
- elktea 14y ago
  The keyword you're looking for is 'DirectWrite'. Here's a post from January this year indicating they're working on it: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/5BQYLaalCoY/LiVE-A9RZpoJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/...
- Flenser 14y ago
  As elktea said, this will be fixed with DirectWrite support. This is the issue you need to star: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
gavanwoolery 14y ago
Unfortunately, a laptop is still a laptop. Small keyboard, inferior mouse (or lack thereof), single display, performance constrained by battery life. The performance margins are getting slimmer, but for a little over the price of the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with tax), I could build you a 64-core AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, that would utterly destroy the Macbook performance-wise. Obviously, to each their own. I don't think the author is protein-folding or raytraycing, so this computer probably suits his needs better. Alternately, I could build a six-screen Beowulf cluster using 6 Nexus 7 tablets for $1200 (Tegra 3 performance is getting close to Core-Duo performance).
- deleted 14y ago
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  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Well, HN isn't "the internet", it has its own traditions. I didn't down vote you, but, if I vehemently disagree with you, I'll certainly do so, regardless of how thoughtful and considerate your comment is. Likewise, if I see something in the grey that I agree with, I'll go out of my way to upvote it back to at least neutral. In general, the vast majority of comments on HN fall within the bounds of good taste, so consider ones aggregate karma as a reflection of what the community here assesses the validity of your contribution as.
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- tsahyt 14y ago
  You're probably right about a couple of things here. First of all, Apple's products are notoriously expensive. I've once got myself a list of hardware in the Mac Pro and looked up the individual prices of the components. It added up to roughly half of what Apple charges you. For that sort of money you have a huge margin of what you can do to make things quicker. Also, laptops are not performance computers. The idea of a "high-end gamer laptop" makes me shiver and every time somebody asks me which laptop to buy for high-end gaming I'll tell them "a desktop". The thing is though, that a proper laptop is good enough for doing a lot of work-related tasks and definitely good enough for consumer use. People like their laptops because they can carry them around, use them wherever they want. And they know that the price for this mobility is worse performance. Most people don't care though. It's quick enough for most things they do, so there's no reason to care either. Personally I like my laptop, it's got a near-fullsize keyboard, a whopping 18.4" display and I don't care about a mouse at all, so the touchpad doesn't bother me. It's quick enough for everything I do, large enough to be comfortable to work on but still at a size that makes it somewhat portable. Now obviously, if you've got performance computing to do, stay away from laptops. For everything else, they're just fine.
mcmire 14y ago
I kind of had the same thought too, as I walked through the Apple Store today and took a gander at some of the Retina MBP's. I thought: in as soon as 5 years, people are going to look at the pre-Retina MBP's and wonder, how did we ever live with 160 DPI displays? All of these jaggedies, this unsharp text, these blurry textures in iCal -- all this ugliness that you have to squint your eyes to see. Who would want that? And for a moment I regretted I'd gotten an Air instead of a rMBP. But then I realized... what I have is good enough. It is. It's great. And there will be better products to come. And I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. But it is interesting to think about a future world where pixels are antiquities, merely "remember when's".
kenjackson 14y ago
I'm probably just blind, but I have trouble seeing the difference in display quality based on resolution. And I don't think I'm alone. When I was at the Apple Store after they launched the new iPad, there were several people who confused the iPad 2 for the new iPad. And even after being shown they were looking at the wrong one didn't go, "Oh... this one looks much better!", rather I heard from multiple people a line like, "Oh, what's the difference?" I've looked at the HTC Titan side by side with an HTC Rezound (one of the lowest PPI versus probably the highest PPI phones) and it's really hard to tell the difference unless you're really looking hard. I think in part because even the worst PPI on phones is actually quite good. I haven't seen the retina display on the Mac Book Retina Display, but I do hope that it lives up to the hype, as I was sorely disappointed by how incremental the iPad retina display was (versus the iPad 2). (Note, the iPhone jump to Retina Display was a visibly dramatic improvement.)
- danbee 14y ago
  Your eye sight must be terrible. The retina iPad is a vast improvement over the iPad 2 for me.
  - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    Note that the whole point of the "retina" branding is that at a certain distance you will no longer see any improvement as you move further back. If those people were standing sufficiently far back (as you might when looking at a store display iPad) then the retina effect will kick in.
  - MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
    The difference between the retina and non-retina products is shocking once you're accustomed to the retina version. If I pick up my wife's iPad 1 or my old iPod touch, it's like looking at a jumbotron. It's the first thing I see. "Ohh, a big clunky grid of pixels... I forgot!" For now I haven't switched my computer screen, but I worry after a few weeks on a retina monitor, I'll have the same reaction to other displays.
- mturmon 14y ago
kilowatt 14y ago
I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel to judge the impact on your overall experience, IMO. Lion inverted trackpad scrolling so that when you drag your two fingers down, the content follows them, like there is a physical connection between your hand and the page. On the Retina MBP, that illusion was mostly lost for me. I'm actually curious to know if owners of the Retina display get used to this chugginess, or if it's still kind of a big deal, even after awhile. I know only a little bit about hardware composition in WebKit—and webpages are definitely not assembled "entirely" on the GPU. I suspect that there are gains to be made there, just in terms of how much work is being offloaded. Even if desktop Safari were to do what my old iPhone 3GS would do—separate the thread handling scrolling from the thread doing the painting, so that you could actually scroll ahead of where the renderer had filled in content, and see a checkerboard pattern—might be a better feeling alternative. Then again, this could already be happening. I haven't kept up with WebKit changes. Credit to Apple for pushing the boundaries. But I want my buttery smooth page renders, damnit. /end entitled whining
- othermaciej 14y ago
  As of Safari 6 on Mountain Lion, scrolling is threaded and nonblocking on Mac, but it doesn't yet work for all pages. So yes, you can scroll ahead of what is painted. The most common exception is pages with fixed positioning.
- czr80 14y ago
  Was it running Lion or ML? I recall some reviews mentioning that ML had specific optimisations to improve scrolling performance.
  - kilowatt 14y ago
    It was Lion. I'll revisit my impressions. It'd be nice to collect some hard data too...
timthorn 14y ago
> Dots were how computers rendered everything: pixels on screen, dots of ink/toner on paper The writer seems to ignore the world of X-Y plotters and vector graphics workstations, which have been around since the very early days of computing.
dfischer 14y ago
My 2009 MacBook pro just died and I'm debating which Mbp to get. I'm leaning on the non-retina display because of the reports of FPS sluggishness. I'm very aware of frame rates. Also, I keep hearing programs like photoshop and so on aren't optimized for retina yet. As much as I'd like to be bleeding edge, and even help develop for it... I can't help but feel it's at least another year before its more viable to go retina. I don't want FPS lag. I'm probably going to pick up the 1,700 model and add 3rd party ssd + 16gb ram.
stinnyfregs 14y ago
Gruber's full of shit. I had a 1600x1200 17" monitor in the 90s. LCDs were a step back in pixel density, and retina means they're JUST NOW catching up to where I was 15 years ago.
- frou_dh 14y ago
  That's incorrect. MBPs were available with better density than your figure starting 5 years ago (1920x1200 @ 17"). I have one from 2009 and it continues to be a joy.
  - stinnyfregs 14y ago
    You still to this day can't buy a 17" 1080p monitor. LCDs are still behind my 15-year-old CRT.
    - accountoftheday 14y ago
      my old T61p's 1920x1200 15.4" panel disagrees.
      - stinnyfregs 14y ago
        That's not a monitor, Archimedes. That's a laptop.
twodayslate 14y ago
I found this to be true with my phone. I currently have an iPhone 4 and I want to switch soon. However, looking at the other phone screens hurts my eyes. The image seems blurry.
Aldor 14y ago
I bought a new MacBook Pro during WWDC this year. I had the option to get the RMBP, but I didn't, and I don't regret my decision. The performance vs. cost ratio of this laptop is significantly higher (plus I get a disc drive), and honestly with the high-res screen, I have to be a lot closer than my normal viewing distance to notice a difference between this and the RMBP. Only thing I think I think I'll regret in the future is not getting an SSD. Oh well. I like my storage space more than my speed.
- dfischer 14y ago
  Since you got a non retina MBP you can upgrade your storage to a SSD and at a discount.

143 points by olivercameron 14y ago

Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-end desktop. Compared to a high-end desktop which has barely seen updates since 2010, and includes a GPU released in 2009, sure.

harpastum 14y ago
The point being made was that it is a desktop-class machine. Generally, laptops have always been convenience and portability, and desktops have had power and price point. Obviously there are exceptions to any rule, but in this case, the display is actually better than any desktop I've seen, and the SSD and CPU/GPU give it all the power necessary for 95% of users. The price point is definitely high, but otherwise it seems best of both worlds.
- lmm 14y ago
  You've always been able to get a laptop that was as good as the desktops of 2-3 years ago, and never one that's as good as the current ones. Saying "desktop-class" is a nonsense; this is no different from previous efforts. Now, if you're saying we've reached the point where the extra CPU etc. of a desktop are not worth it for most users, then I agree with you. But again that's nothing specific to the macbook air; any modern laptop will have the same properties.

msutherl 14y ago

I've recently been studying typography and it's been really heartbreaking to realize that what differentiates a good and a bad typeface onscreen is how it well it renders. Plenty of great typefaces are just unusable. Most fonts distort wildly as you step up/down in pixel size. I didn't start in print design, but man is web design primitive in comparison!

evoxed 14y ago
I have to admit that rage was starting to burn inside of me until I read your last sentence– that's one of the reasons why I take so few jobs for the web these days. I always thought that web technologies would far surpass what we could do in print (which, as a lead type junkie, sounded pretty amazing) and then I grew up, started dealing with W3C &c;– now here we are, only in the last two years or so getting a reliable (and compliant) way of using more than just Times, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, &c... It's slow, slow progress but it's great to see that while those issues are hashing themselves out that the pixel problem is practically resolved. (Though I should note that pixels or not, setting a spread to be displayed digitally was never that much of a problem if it didn't have to be displayed in the browser. Sure, some fonts have shitty hinting but the ball is at least in your court.)

cmelbye 14y ago

I totally agree about the Lucida Grande thing. It's weird seeing fonts like Lucida Grande and Verdana on such a nice display.

Xcelerate 14y ago
The Retina MPB has opened up a whole world of fonts. It's amazing how much attention I pay to them when I visit websites now. There is a downside to such a nice screen -- it makes me painfully OCD. On my previous laptop, the screen was such crap that it didn't bother me. On this one, I notice every subtle flaw. For instance, image retention (which I'm now convinced that after swapping three of these things out eventually affects all of the LG panels used in the MBPR [Samsung panels do not seem to have the issue]). Then there's the fact that it's just slightly not bright enough for my liking. I find myself hitting the brighten button a lot when it is at max. No matter that my old laptop looks downright dim next to this. And despite the fact that it is an IPS display, the colors do change quite a bit with viewing angle. A solid white screen kind of shimmers in luminance and tint when moving my head. And the black level isn't pure black. And 220ppi isn't quite enough to complete the no-pixel illusion for me. And the color gamut could be a smidge greater. It's like the uncanny valley of screens. It's so close to perfect, but not quite there, that it leaves me paying a weird amount of attention to it. But I wouldn't trade it for any other.

cageface 14y ago

Color me surprised to read another frothing fluff piece for an Apple product from arch-apparatchik Gruber. Doubling the display density of a laptop screen qualifies Apple for the Nobel Peace prize now, or something.

pooriaazimi 14y ago
I'm not sure what your critique is. He's not a politician or TV host getting paid by the bad Apple to write/say nice lies about them... He writes about Apple, and people visit his website to read what he writes. It's that simple. If you disagree with any of his points, please post them in this topic. But don't go dismissing it just because it's from arch-apparatchik Gruber.
- cageface 14y ago
  As he himself has written on his blog, in exchange for this kind of PR he gets invited to private meetings inside Apple.
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Does he? What are you referring to? The Mountain Lion presentation? Apple invited loads of journalists to that, they just also included Gruber there.
    - cageface 14y ago
      http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR.
      - arrrg 14y ago
        Sure. And? What’s your point? Apple met separately with loads of journalists. I don’t see anything special about how they treated Gruber.

reitzensteinm 14y ago

> Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-end desktop. It helps if that high end desktop hasn't been updated in two years. For CPU performance, laptops lagging a couple of years behind desktops is more or less business as usual.

lloeki 14y ago
Still, we're talking about a Xeon here, not your typical desktop-variant Core Something. It was a powerhouse.
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  The benchmarks were lightly threaded, for which Xeons basically offer no advantage - they let you have more cores in a machine, and that's about all. For rendering and encoding, the 12 core 2010 Mac Pros would still slaughter a retina MBP. No competition. There are many impressive things about the retina MBP, but CPU performance is not one of them.
  - Synaesthesia 14y ago
    I would say the CPU performance is very impressive, sure a 12 core will beat it at rendering, but the single threaded performance is amazing, and the super fast SSD makes it basically the fastest Mac ever in general usage.
muro 14y ago
Even worse, it's 4 years for GPUs.

SCdF 14y ago

So more pixels is great. Is it really that great? I feel like there are people who look at their devices and people who look at what's displayed on their devices. For me, text is text is text. I'm looking at it, not so I can enjoy how crisp it is (or isn't), but so I can consume those words and get them inside my head. I find (I've played around with high DPI devices) that while they do look nice, the niceness is quickly forgotten when I actually start using them for something other than looking at how nice they look. Likewise, going back to use lower DPI devices you notice the difference, until you stop looking for it and actually get work done. I'm not saying that I don't care entirely, I just... I wouldn't go and buy a new device solely because its resolution was higher. It will be nice when these devices eventually make it to me, but I'm not really bothered either way. If we were to talk about recent revolutions in the home computer I'd rank multi-core CPUs as a much more important change. No longer can one broken app go on a rampage and block you out. Anyway, tl;dr; it's great he's passionate about it, I just don't see it as such as important thing.

cageface 14y ago
I have an iPad 3 and an iPad 2. The "retina" display is certainly a nice upgrade but it's hardly essential. This is obviously where the industry has been heading for a while and the only thing interesting about it here is that Apple's supply chain dynamics makes it possible for them to get 6-12 months ahead of the competition.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Some text looks like crap on the old screen (iPad 1), with visible aliasing and color fringes - making zooming absolutely required for reading. Not so with the retina display.
msutherl 14y ago
Some people make a point of appreciating the small joys of life. Others do not. Much effort and attention is lost on the latter.
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deleted 14y ago

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evoxed 14y ago

So, here's a question for those who actually have one of these mega-res displays... how's the terminal? Or any other typically aliased text? Secondly, how well does it work in a dual/2+ boot situation? Obviously other systems have the drivers for such large displays, but without knowing how to scale it... Is there any way to set the hardware to simply enlarge everything x2 in the absence of serious display drivers (for example, a desktopless linux or bsd)?

nilium 14y ago
re: A terminal: probably fine, albeit small. Running at 2880x1800 without any scaling isn't terrible, but it would quickly drive your eyes to escape your skull. I can't say for sure what would happen under Linux given only a terminal, but I imagine things would be pretty small until you got it using a different resolution than the native resolution. Terminal emulators are fine, but I assumed you meant the other kind. Terminal emulators look great, as does every text editor I've used (MacVim, vim in a terminal emulator, Sublime Text 2, TextMate 2, Xcode [looks great, but it's unfortunately still a lousy IDE], etc.). re: Dual boot, also fine in my case, though I only keep Mac OS and Windows 7 installed right now. Windows 7 in particular is an issue, as DPI scaling only affects some programs (so where on Mac OS you'd get pixel-doubled views or text, on Windows you get windows that aren't scaled at all, such as Chrome). If you have dual monitors, Windows is particularly painful, as DPI scaling is system-wide rather than per-screen. I haven't tested Windows 8 and likely won't until after it's been released. The best route I've found is to simply set the display to 1920x1200 or lower and scale it up on Windows. Windows 7 just doesn't handle high resolution stuff particularly well -- it's not bad, but things just aren't all there. I expect Windows 8 will be better. I couldn't say what your options are on a desktopless Linux/BSD system, but I would imagine that there's something you could do, even if that something is just using a larger font.
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andrewfelix 14y ago

One thing that I've noticed as pixel density is increasing, is many 3rd party UI elements aren't increasing in size relative to monitor improvements. I remember using Photoshop on my old LC475 in the 90's and not having to squint and hold the mouse steady to select the tool I wanted. Please tell me someone else has noticed this? Or am I just getting old.

cshesse 14y ago
Monitor pixel densities haven't increased that much, they've been limited by having to keep interface elements visible. It's only easy for apple because they just doubled the density in both directions. Any intermediate numbers of pixels would have impacted usability.

jcampbell1 14y ago

I find it quite surprising that the author is so passionate about typefaces, but serves his own blog in Verdana. Good thing it is not called JaringJireJall.net [1] That being said, I really think the days of sans fonts are close to over. 10 years from now, we will all be reading on 300 dpi screens and taste in typography will return to being the dominate feature of design. I can't wait until I can read the Economist online in the correct typeface. I can walk down an airplane isle and recognize that font in less than a second. The New Yorker also uses a font that seems to be unique. The Atlantic needs a custom typeface. I am so excited that high DPI screens are going to be the norm. The web design world as we know it today is about shitty flourishing with artwork. 10 years from now it will be about designing beautiful glyphs that represent the brand. [1] J is particularly gross in Verdana.

jmduke 14y ago
I'm interested in this. As someone who doesn't pay that much attention to typography (beyond the obvious 'Papyrus is bad' stuff) what makes individual typefaces preferable over a standard typeface for all similarly structured content? (Besides branding, that is.)
- sbierwagen 14y ago
  It's pure marketing. There's no objective, measurable difference.
  - LoganCale 14y ago
    Yes there is. Certain typefaces are objectively easier to read than others, and some work better for certain content than others. Some are best for body text, some are best for headlines, etc. Some are optimized for low resolution screens, some for print (and as such work well on high resolution screens).
    - delackner 14y ago
      A great recent example that appeared on HN was the typeface designed for road signs, which the designers then put through Germany(?)'s test suite for legibility at distance in various road conditions and determined the new font was objectively legible at greater distance than all previous standard road-sign fonts with which it was compared. [By request, I found the original article: http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage-typeface/ http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag... ]

jmitcheson 14y ago

It's a shame Google Chrome still doesn't render CSS3 fonts correctly on Windows. The strangest thing about it is that they barely even seem to acknowledge that it's an issue. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-rendering-of-font-face-in-chrome http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-renderin... If you've noticed that web fonts look terrible on Windows / Chrome, please star these issues! http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371

elktea 14y ago
The keyword you're looking for is 'DirectWrite'. Here's a post from January this year indicating they're working on it: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/5BQYLaalCoY/LiVE-A9RZpoJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/...
Flenser 14y ago
As elktea said, this will be fixed with DirectWrite support. This is the issue you need to star: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

gavanwoolery 14y ago

Unfortunately, a laptop is still a laptop. Small keyboard, inferior mouse (or lack thereof), single display, performance constrained by battery life. The performance margins are getting slimmer, but for a little over the price of the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with tax), I could build you a 64-core AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, that would utterly destroy the Macbook performance-wise. Obviously, to each their own. I don't think the author is protein-folding or raytraycing, so this computer probably suits his needs better. Alternately, I could build a six-screen Beowulf cluster using 6 Nexus 7 tablets for $1200 (Tegra 3 performance is getting close to Core-Duo performance).

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- ghshephard 14y ago
  Well, HN isn't "the internet", it has its own traditions. I didn't down vote you, but, if I vehemently disagree with you, I'll certainly do so, regardless of how thoughtful and considerate your comment is. Likewise, if I see something in the grey that I agree with, I'll go out of my way to upvote it back to at least neutral. In general, the vast majority of comments on HN fall within the bounds of good taste, so consider ones aggregate karma as a reflection of what the community here assesses the validity of your contribution as.
- deleted 14y ago
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tsahyt 14y ago
You're probably right about a couple of things here. First of all, Apple's products are notoriously expensive. I've once got myself a list of hardware in the Mac Pro and looked up the individual prices of the components. It added up to roughly half of what Apple charges you. For that sort of money you have a huge margin of what you can do to make things quicker. Also, laptops are not performance computers. The idea of a "high-end gamer laptop" makes me shiver and every time somebody asks me which laptop to buy for high-end gaming I'll tell them "a desktop". The thing is though, that a proper laptop is good enough for doing a lot of work-related tasks and definitely good enough for consumer use. People like their laptops because they can carry them around, use them wherever they want. And they know that the price for this mobility is worse performance. Most people don't care though. It's quick enough for most things they do, so there's no reason to care either. Personally I like my laptop, it's got a near-fullsize keyboard, a whopping 18.4" display and I don't care about a mouse at all, so the touchpad doesn't bother me. It's quick enough for everything I do, large enough to be comfortable to work on but still at a size that makes it somewhat portable. Now obviously, if you've got performance computing to do, stay away from laptops. For everything else, they're just fine.

mcmire 14y ago

I kind of had the same thought too, as I walked through the Apple Store today and took a gander at some of the Retina MBP's. I thought: in as soon as 5 years, people are going to look at the pre-Retina MBP's and wonder, how did we ever live with 160 DPI displays? All of these jaggedies, this unsharp text, these blurry textures in iCal -- all this ugliness that you have to squint your eyes to see. Who would want that? And for a moment I regretted I'd gotten an Air instead of a rMBP. But then I realized... what I have is good enough. It is. It's great. And there will be better products to come. And I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. But it is interesting to think about a future world where pixels are antiquities, merely "remember when's".

kenjackson 14y ago

I'm probably just blind, but I have trouble seeing the difference in display quality based on resolution. And I don't think I'm alone. When I was at the Apple Store after they launched the new iPad, there were several people who confused the iPad 2 for the new iPad. And even after being shown they were looking at the wrong one didn't go, "Oh... this one looks much better!", rather I heard from multiple people a line like, "Oh, what's the difference?" I've looked at the HTC Titan side by side with an HTC Rezound (one of the lowest PPI versus probably the highest PPI phones) and it's really hard to tell the difference unless you're really looking hard. I think in part because even the worst PPI on phones is actually quite good. I haven't seen the retina display on the Mac Book Retina Display, but I do hope that it lives up to the hype, as I was sorely disappointed by how incremental the iPad retina display was (versus the iPad 2). (Note, the iPhone jump to Retina Display was a visibly dramatic improvement.)

danbee 14y ago
Your eye sight must be terrible. The retina iPad is a vast improvement over the iPad 2 for me.
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  Note that the whole point of the "retina" branding is that at a certain distance you will no longer see any improvement as you move further back. If those people were standing sufficiently far back (as you might when looking at a store display iPad) then the retina effect will kick in.
- MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
  The difference between the retina and non-retina products is shocking once you're accustomed to the retina version. If I pick up my wife's iPad 1 or my old iPod touch, it's like looking at a jumbotron. It's the first thing I see. "Ohh, a big clunky grid of pixels... I forgot!" For now I haven't switched my computer screen, but I worry after a few weeks on a retina monitor, I'll have the same reaction to other displays.
mturmon 14y ago

kilowatt 14y ago

I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel to judge the impact on your overall experience, IMO. Lion inverted trackpad scrolling so that when you drag your two fingers down, the content follows them, like there is a physical connection between your hand and the page. On the Retina MBP, that illusion was mostly lost for me. I'm actually curious to know if owners of the Retina display get used to this chugginess, or if it's still kind of a big deal, even after awhile. I know only a little bit about hardware composition in WebKit—and webpages are definitely not assembled "entirely" on the GPU. I suspect that there are gains to be made there, just in terms of how much work is being offloaded. Even if desktop Safari were to do what my old iPhone 3GS would do—separate the thread handling scrolling from the thread doing the painting, so that you could actually scroll ahead of where the renderer had filled in content, and see a checkerboard pattern—might be a better feeling alternative. Then again, this could already be happening. I haven't kept up with WebKit changes. Credit to Apple for pushing the boundaries. But I want my buttery smooth page renders, damnit. /end entitled whining

othermaciej 14y ago
As of Safari 6 on Mountain Lion, scrolling is threaded and nonblocking on Mac, but it doesn't yet work for all pages. So yes, you can scroll ahead of what is painted. The most common exception is pages with fixed positioning.
czr80 14y ago
Was it running Lion or ML? I recall some reviews mentioning that ML had specific optimisations to improve scrolling performance.
- kilowatt 14y ago
  It was Lion. I'll revisit my impressions. It'd be nice to collect some hard data too...

timthorn 14y ago

> Dots were how computers rendered everything: pixels on screen, dots of ink/toner on paper The writer seems to ignore the world of X-Y plotters and vector graphics workstations, which have been around since the very early days of computing.

dfischer 14y ago

My 2009 MacBook pro just died and I'm debating which Mbp to get. I'm leaning on the non-retina display because of the reports of FPS sluggishness. I'm very aware of frame rates. Also, I keep hearing programs like photoshop and so on aren't optimized for retina yet. As much as I'd like to be bleeding edge, and even help develop for it... I can't help but feel it's at least another year before its more viable to go retina. I don't want FPS lag. I'm probably going to pick up the 1,700 model and add 3rd party ssd + 16gb ram.

stinnyfregs 14y ago

Gruber's full of shit. I had a 1600x1200 17" monitor in the 90s. LCDs were a step back in pixel density, and retina means they're JUST NOW catching up to where I was 15 years ago.

frou_dh 14y ago
That's incorrect. MBPs were available with better density than your figure starting 5 years ago (1920x1200 @ 17"). I have one from 2009 and it continues to be a joy.
- stinnyfregs 14y ago
  You still to this day can't buy a 17" 1080p monitor. LCDs are still behind my 15-year-old CRT.
  - accountoftheday 14y ago
    my old T61p's 1920x1200 15.4" panel disagrees.
    - stinnyfregs 14y ago
      That's not a monitor, Archimedes. That's a laptop.

twodayslate 14y ago

I found this to be true with my phone. I currently have an iPhone 4 and I want to switch soon. However, looking at the other phone screens hurts my eyes. The image seems blurry.

Aldor 14y ago

I bought a new MacBook Pro during WWDC this year. I had the option to get the RMBP, but I didn't, and I don't regret my decision. The performance vs. cost ratio of this laptop is significantly higher (plus I get a disc drive), and honestly with the high-res screen, I have to be a lot closer than my normal viewing distance to notice a difference between this and the RMBP. Only thing I think I think I'll regret in the future is not getting an SSD. Oh well. I like my storage space more than my speed.

dfischer 14y ago
Since you got a non retina MBP you can upgrade your storage to a SSD and at a discount.