I worked on resolution independence on OS X over a period of years. I think the above comment is not made with full appreciation of the difficulty of the proble

I worked on resolution independence on OS X over a period of years. I think the above comment is not made with full appreciation of the difficulty of the problem. Supporting arbitrary resolutions well is very difficult. The underlying frameworks (e.g. CoreGraphics) are absolutely capable of rendering at arbitrary resolutions, and have been for a long time. It's not particularly hard: you interpose an affine transform which converts from local to device coordinates, apply it to all your geometry, and it falls out. But "rendering at arbitrary resolutions" is not the same as "looks good at arbitrary resolutions." For example, a line 1 px wide at 1x will be 1.5 pixels wide at 1.5x. That means at least one edge must be aligned on a partial pixel, and there's the potential for weird antialiasing effects. There's also a behavior change: you cannot redraw half a pixel, so now "dirtying" a pixel requires redrawing more components at 1.5x than at 1x, which can cause performance problems and other bugs. And there's also a question of which pixels get the partial alignment: do you round in a direction? If so, which one? Or maybe you don't round and you have two pixels that are a quarter covered? Which leads to the problem of centering. I wish to center a bitmap image within a button's border. The image is 101 logical points high, and the border is 200 logical points high. With a 2x scale factor, I can center absolutely, and still be aligned to device pixels. With a 1x, 1.25, 1.33, etc. scale factor, centering will align me on a partial pixel, which looks like crap. So I have to round. Which way? If the goal is "make it look good," then the answer is "whichever way looks good," which depends on the visual style of the bezel, i.e. whether the top or bottom has more visual weight. So now we need hinting. And that's where things start to get really nasty. In order to make things look good at arbitrary resolutions, we want to round to device pixels. But the rounding direction is not a local question! Consider what happens if we have two visual elements abutting in logical coordinates, and they round in opposite directions: now there's a device pixel between them. That's very visible: you get a pixel crack! So you have to coordinate rounding. WPF is a good example of a framework that attempted resolution independence and encountered this problem. Initially it has the "SnapsToDevicePixels" property, which triggers rounding behavior at draw time. But draw time is too late, because of the "abutting elements rounding in opposite directions" problem. So they introduced the "UseLayoutRounding" property, which does...something. And the guidance is basically "turn it on and see if it helps, if not, disable it." Great. The web also has this problem in spades. Websites break in all sorts of fun ways when you zoom in or out. We tolerate this because, frankly, the bar is super-low for websites. As I see it, the two options are: 1. Make everything vectors. You'll have to choose between weird antialiasing artifacts and potential pixel cracks; either way things will look bad. And you'll encounter bitmaps eventually, and have to deal with the necessities of resampling and pixel aligning at that point. 2. Scale only to integral sizes, and resample. You'll avoid antialiasing and pixel alignment issues, but pay a performance penalty, and things may look slightly blurry. So which option is better? #1 has the potential for the highest-quality output, but at a significant price: developers must test their apps at more scale factors, and the failure mode is ugly drawing artifacts or outright bugs. #2 is more utilitarian: the output is not as nice, and you incur a perf penalty, but that's borne by the system instead of the apps, and the overall system is more consistent. #2 is also more forward looking: if you expect that pixel densities will continue to increase, then resampling artifacts will eventually be indiscernible, but a pixel crack will always be visible. Apple took the practical and forward-looking approach to this problem. I can't fault them: to my knowledge, nobody has successfully implemented true resolution independence in a framework with wide adoption. If they have, I'd love to know how!