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Doesn't OS X already support displays up to 2560x1600? Afaik that was the resolution of Apple's own (now discontinued) 30" display and the resolution of most, if not all, 30" displays available at the moment. 3200x2000 is nothing but the next rung on the ladder. This is just Apple future-proofing their OS a bit. If they release anything in the short term it will most likely be a big-ass iMac or a bigger Apple Display, NOT a laptop running that resolution. Just saying...

I believe your comment is on the money. Considering they have discontinued the 30" ACD for the 27" model.

Hopefully this brings in 32.5" ACD, and DisplayPort can handle the increase in resolution.
 
we wont see it in macs until mid 2012

I don't think you will see it period. There is really no reason for a Retina Display to be on any Mac. on an iOS device maybe considering reading iBooks and other text since screen real estate is at a premium along with balanced battery life. On a Mac not so, even a Mac portable. Doubling of.... haha seriously not required. ;):D

It is not cost effective considering the cost of the screen, power to run it and the GPU power to handle it all, considering :apple: Eco FootPrint goal. I do not see it happening. It is the resolution for an upcoming 32.5" ACD.
 
I will be honest and truthful and say for a mobile device on batteries, I'm very impressed as what the iPhone and iPad can do gaming wise.

However I will also state, and I think we all should be honest, that at the moment, Apple are bringing the games DOWN to what their hardware can do, as opposed to making Hardware so great that gaming is being pushed UP to take advantage of Apples industry leading performance.

In your first paragraph you talk about Apple's mobile products, which is where Apple will be putting most of their effort in the foreseeable future. To have successful portable products, having a long time between charges is highly important. The old brute force methods of throwing power and RAM at the gaming performance problem can not be part of the design mindset. Game designers know this and are becoming much better at coding for portable games, but they are not quite there yet. Meanwhile Apple is working to find ways to build in performance and not increase power draw.

THIS is the future as Apple sees it, and their acceptance in the broad general market shows that they are on the right track.

When Apple release GTX580 beating desktops, and/or Xbox360 / PS3 beating gaming devices, I will happily bow down to them being the greatest in graphics.

NOW you have switched to talking about desktop and console gaming computers. THIS is a whole different area. First off, it's a tiny segment of the whole computer market. It's big, but not nearly as huge as what Apple is aiming for with their products.

In a nutshell, Apple's strategy is to capture the mobile device market as completely as they can. They are being highly successful at that strategy from iPods to iPhones, to iPads, to Laptops.

Meanwhile they are growing rapidly in the iMac desktop and tower market due primarily to the halo effect of their success in the portable arena. They are doing this even while the desktop and tower markets are shrinking overall. Can you see why Apple will not be putting a lot of effort into this segment?

But right now, they are trailing by miles due to years of neglect as they just did not have products that could compete, and their one semi attempt at a console got nowhere.

Note: I would LOVE LOVE LOVE Apple to turn this around.

You are right. Apple did not have products that could compete in the desktop and console markets. This was primarily due to game developers not interested in writing games for Intel chips and PowerPC chips. Since the installed base for Intel-based computers was more then a order-of-magnitude larger than the installed base of Macs. Apple was never going to enjoy being a suitable gaming platform until they switched to Intel CPUs.

Once Apple made the switch, they have come a long way towards being an acceptable gaming computer, but they have no desire or plans to go after the high end of this market... it's just not that profitable or large. Remember AlienWare? They had the best gaming computer, IMO, and they had to sell themselves to another company to stay alive.

As for the console market, it's crowded with established competitors and will likely see one squeezed out. Not the kind of market that Apple or anyone else should want to jump into.

They need to ditch the "Laptops on a Stand" design of the iMac for starters, but I feel they never will as they have decided they won't compete and they cannot compete in this sector of the market.

I addressed this above. As for the "Laptops on a Stand" design, it's such a bad design that the largest computer company, HP, as well as others, have copied it.

Console wise, I'm not sure they could compete against a 360 or a PS3. Let's say Apple against a PS4 or a Xbox720
Nope, can't see that happening either.

I address this above. Apple doesn't want to be in this arena. It's small and the competition is deadly.

The low power/trimmed down, casual gamers games, seems to be the only area they are going for.

Once more you are correct. There are many many times more gamers that want a short diversion while they have a few minutes away from home, then those who want to spend thousands on an immersive game experience that requires a larger block of time. "Portability with games optional" trumps "wired to the wall and game-focused" all the way to the bank.

But Again, I would LOVE Apple to turn this around and take high end graphics seriously in their future products.

The high-end gamer is not on Apple's radar at the moment and likely never will be unless a way is found to address hi-end graphics on a portable device without impacting battery life.

I know you'd like Apple to chase this rainbow, but they won't, there's no pot of gold at the end.
 
It always amazes me that no matter what the news, there are always a few negative votes. A story could come out that new Macs will be a million times more powerful than anything else out there at the same price as PCs and some twerps would mark that as a negative. I guess you could call those people Apple anti-fan boys.
 
We need 1080p everything!!

Why has it taken them so long to embrace HD????!! And no... 720p is not the standard...
 
a retina display on the 13" MBP would be the one thing that would get me to upgrade almost immediately.

Your reaction is nearly identical to mine (although I am interested in seeing a Retina Display on the 11.4" MBA):

Double the pixel density on the 11.4" MBA screen, and I will pay $3k for that computer on the spot (even if I just upgraded to the Sandy Bridge version the week before). The stunning display on the iPhone 4 put them into a class unmatched by their rivals.

I can't wait...even if it still takes years to trickle down to the MBA. Someday all computer screens will have Retina Displays (and we will only see screens where the pixels are visible in a museum). Although I may be dead by then... :)
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8H7)

As I said a while ago, the next gen of MBP's will have a really good screen as a main selling point.

No one listens!
 
The basic fact is vector graphics aren't always appropriate. A lot of things really can only be done, or can be done much better, with pixels. For any image with a lot of detail, it's easier -- both for the artists making them, and for the computers rendering them -- to store an extremely high resolution bitmapped image, and then downscale it as necessary, than it is to make and render a vectorized version that is "truly" resolution independent.

What about 3-D images? Is a cube-matrix better than vectors? Or a matrix of vectors????
 
Although I'd absolutely love this, I highly doubt it'll be here for a while.

I think the first step would be increasing displays to like 1800x1080 on the 13", and 1900x1200 on the 15" and 2400x1440 on the 17" - while keeping the same user interface size. That would be awesome.

Then in the next 5-10 years, I'd expect full retina.

I doubt it would be a full jump from 1440x900 --> 3200x2000 on a 15" or something like that.
 
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As I said a while ago, the next gen of MBP's will have a really good screen as a main selling point.

No one listens!

Maybe good screens, but NOT retinas. :p (Although I wish they would have them)
 
Doesn't OS X already support displays up to 2560x1600? Afaik that was the resolution of Apple's own (now discontinued) 30" display and the resolution of most, if not all, 30" displays available at the moment. 3200x2000 is nothing but the next rung on the ladder. This is just Apple future-proofing their OS a bit. If they release anything in the short term it will most likely be a big-ass iMac or a bigger Apple Display, NOT a laptop running that resolution. Just saying...

Yep. My Apple 30", which I bought in 2005 is 2560 x 1600. Oh, and my MacBook Pro 17", which runs at 1900 x 1200 can drive it as a secondary display. So could my older 17".

Here's something most people don't know. IBM created a 200 PPI display back in 2000. Veiwsonic later released it as their VP2290b, which ran at 3200 x 2400. I recall when it came out, that it was over $6k. It required 2 DVI cables to drive it, since at that time, Dual-DVI ports were not available.
 
Wasn't that a big thing from the Leopard announcement?

No. Developers were told to get ready, but with the developer tools, you can see that many still aren't ready, including Apple.

It was never an announced feature for Leopard.
 
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So I gonna have a hard time finding wallpaper.
 
They use a lot more CPU time to process though. A JPG can be quickly converted to a bitmap and sent off to the GPU, a vector image has to be rendered before conversion to bitmap. Just imagine moving your mouse over the Dock with magnification on, each icon would need to be re-rendered for every time the mouse moved one pixel. With bitmaps, it's all done by the GPU. When there're hundreds of icons on display at once, that will probably become quite CPU intensive. I'm not surprised KDE supported it, it's open source, and we all know Linux is the king of feature creep.

You said yourself that wallpapers should be vector graphics. And by that, I presumed you meant the background in the subject of the thread. Safari supports SVG, but imo, it's not really a big thing that there's no support for it as a wallpaper. It's not the first thing people think of when they list Snow Leopard's shortcomings :p

What intelligent Developer would use the CPU to convert Vectors -> Bitmaps when they have a GPGPU to do the heavy lifting? Certainly not Apple.
 
If the coming soon refreshed 13" MBA gets a 13" 2880x1800 HiDPI/Retina display, Sandy Bridge and Lion preinstalled... It will be so win. And PC guys will be stuck with their legacy 1280x800 haha.
 
You could argue that when they pump all consumer Mac resolutions up to the limit of human perception, resolution independence becomes sort of moot.
Almost, but not quite. Full resolution independence would allow you to change the scale/size of UI elements. Even if you can't see the pixels, some people may prefer smaller or larger "virtual" resolutions.
 
3200x2000 requires 6,400,000 pixels. At 32 bit per pixel, we're talking 25,600,000 bytes of data. Considering modern framebuffers are double buffered, this requires 51,200,000 bytes of memory to hold. That fits into 48.82 MB of RAM. GPUs have had that much since ... hum... 2004 ? So we're good on framebuffer RAM.

Now, bandwidth. In order to refresh the screen 60 times, we need to push out those 25,600,000 pixels. That's going to require 11718 Mbps of bandwidth. Let's see... Display port 1.1a has 10.8 Gbps so it's a no go (though it could almost do it). If only there was a DP 1.2 spec that had a 21.6 Gbps cap... Oh wait there is. :D

So we're good on RAM and bandwidth. Now, what ATI family introduces DP 1.2 so that we can use this new standard ? Oh right, the Radeon HD 6000 series, AMD's current shipping tech! Now if only Apple would release some kind of support for these GPUs, like they did back in 10.6.7 ;) :

http://appleheadlines.com/2011/03/2...ion-for-amd-5000-and-6000-series-video-cards/

So let's see if I got all of this right. We're good on RAM (have been for quite a few years). We're good on bandwidth for 60 hz 3200x2000 resolution. We're good on hardware (AMD 6000 series) and we're good on OS X support (with 10.6.7).

What exactly is missing here ? Oh right, a hardware refresh with said hardware included, which is probably a formality seeing all of these news and facts :cool:

Stop with the well-thought out accountability of resources. People would rather wallow in conjecture about the future w/o bothering to research the present.
 
The past year my right eye's vision has decreased. Interestingly enough that is around when i got my iphone 4, can lack of my eye working and the phone making it easier make my vision worse? Probably not and just a coincidence.


Anyway i wonder if apple will do the whole "It is a 500$ upgrade for retina" thing or it will just be a thing all mbp's have.

No your just getting old. ;)
 
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