One area where Apple has been incredibly aggressive — and Microsoft has been sorely lacking — is in actually producing and preparing high resolution content wel

One area where Apple has been incredibly aggressive — and Microsoft has been sorely lacking — is in actually producing and preparing high resolution content well in advance of the display technology. Apple new this was coming and for years have demanded icons, images, and artwork to be provided in high resolution. They developed assets for their own software in high resolution before retina displays ever hit the market. Contrast to this article where Microsoft's own Visual Studio (one of the "best cases" mentioned by this article) doesn't even have Hi-DPI icons. Microsoft's own software displays blurry icons and it's listed as a "best case." Apple also pushed Intel very hard on driver support for their integrated graphics. Rewriting the driver-level image scaling to ensure that discrete and integrated GPUs produced identical images, again before retina displays ever came on market, to allow for seamless switching between GPUs on their hardware. This sort of foresight was necessary to pull off the high density display introduction as smoothly as they did. Same goes for multiple monitors, which "just worked" when Apple introduced their high density displays. You could connect a regular monitor to your laptop and drag windows across. The DPI and art assets adjusted dynamically. This is something Windows is only just now getting around to fixing in version 8.1.