Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwi

Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter. Are you seriously advocating that Apple use a desktop GPU in their laptops? Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy. None of this is true. First, the 15" retina mbp has a nvidia GT650M along with an intel gpu. And it's still not enough. Remember that a game running at 2880x1800 using filtering can use memory-bandwidth saving tricks like quincunx which can't be used in a desktop environment. Moreover, in the 'scaled-up' 1920x1200 mode the rMBP supports, the rMBP is essentially super-sampling a much larger pre-display buffer than 2880x1800 Have a read: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/8 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-w... At the default setting, either Intel’s HD 4000 or NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M already have to render and display far more pixels than either GPU was ever intended to. At the 1680 and 1920 settings however the GPUs are doing more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to. In writing this article it finally dawned on me exactly what has been happening at Intel over the past few years. ... To be quite honest, the hardware in the rMBP isn’t enough to deliver a consistently smooth experience across all applications. At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish. There’s simply nothing that can be done at this point - Apple is pushing the limits of the hardware we have available today, far beyond what any other OEM has done. Future iterations of the Retina Display MacBook Pro will have faster hardware with embedded DRAM that will help mitigate this problem. But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited. One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"? It has a bigger battery.