supply chain indicates 2560x1600
Hi,
Anybody seen this news ? These guys look at what panels are produced and they've noticed a 13.3" with 4x resolution is currently in production. A clear indication of what the screen spec of the 13" MBPR will be.
For me, 1280x800 is probably enough, particularly on a 13" screen. I'm actually typing this on that resolution, 19". But one thing that people seem to miss is the quality of the non-native resolutions. It used to be that showing an 800x600 on a 1024x768 screen looked really bad. Of course ! Even at native res, you could see the pixels. So doing very rough up/downscaling was obviously going to give really bad artefacts.
With the Retina display, you cannot see the pixels. Also, Apple isn't using dumb scaling mechanisms: they use quad resolution (e.g. 3360x2100 when rendering simulated 1680x1050), which they then downscale. This reduces aliasing and other artefacts significantly. Looking at the Anandtech screenshots (make sure you click "View Original Size" and, if necessary, click again to zoom in to 100%), I can't see any difference in the UI even when it's scaled. So on a screen where you can't see individual pixels, scaling basically cannot be noticed.
That means that with a 13.3" MBPR, you wouldn't just get 2560x1600 resolution. If you want, you can switch it to 1440x900 or other resolutions and work just as if that resolution was native. You won't see the difference anyway. It'll probably be crisper than a competitor's laptop at that resolution, particularly because the Retina displays are high quality IPS.
This, for me, is a game changer. It virtualises screen resolution. I may be exaggerating a bit here, but that's more or less what it comes down to. As I still have to save up before I can purchase any mac at all, this one has suddenly popped up at the top of my list. For serious work (I do documentation), I can work on a 13" screen with 2 pages of readable text next to each other, increasing the (virtual) resolution if required to reduce the size of the UI elements. I can't even do that comfortably with this 19" monitor I'm using at the moment. I expect specs to be quite high, so this would be a machine that would still be quite okay in 5 years' time.
Peter.
Hi,
Anybody seen this news ? These guys look at what panels are produced and they've noticed a 13.3" with 4x resolution is currently in production. A clear indication of what the screen spec of the 13" MBPR will be.
For me, 1280x800 is probably enough, particularly on a 13" screen. I'm actually typing this on that resolution, 19". But one thing that people seem to miss is the quality of the non-native resolutions. It used to be that showing an 800x600 on a 1024x768 screen looked really bad. Of course ! Even at native res, you could see the pixels. So doing very rough up/downscaling was obviously going to give really bad artefacts.
With the Retina display, you cannot see the pixels. Also, Apple isn't using dumb scaling mechanisms: they use quad resolution (e.g. 3360x2100 when rendering simulated 1680x1050), which they then downscale. This reduces aliasing and other artefacts significantly. Looking at the Anandtech screenshots (make sure you click "View Original Size" and, if necessary, click again to zoom in to 100%), I can't see any difference in the UI even when it's scaled. So on a screen where you can't see individual pixels, scaling basically cannot be noticed.
That means that with a 13.3" MBPR, you wouldn't just get 2560x1600 resolution. If you want, you can switch it to 1440x900 or other resolutions and work just as if that resolution was native. You won't see the difference anyway. It'll probably be crisper than a competitor's laptop at that resolution, particularly because the Retina displays are high quality IPS.
This, for me, is a game changer. It virtualises screen resolution. I may be exaggerating a bit here, but that's more or less what it comes down to. As I still have to save up before I can purchase any mac at all, this one has suddenly popped up at the top of my list. For serious work (I do documentation), I can work on a 13" screen with 2 pages of readable text next to each other, increasing the (virtual) resolution if required to reduce the size of the UI elements. I can't even do that comfortably with this 19" monitor I'm using at the moment. I expect specs to be quite high, so this would be a machine that would still be quite okay in 5 years' time.
Peter.
