I mean what is the point of double or quadrupling the pixels only to show content the exact same size as on a lower resolution display?
For me everything would be sharper, and I'd love that on a screen that large. I usually sit about two feet from my 1920x1200 screen and I can easily see all the blurred edges on everything on screen. A higher res would be great and the UI in Yosemite would look like it was printed on screen.
I mean I just bought a laptop with something like 3200 x 1400 resolution, but then Windows UI is scaled at 200% so all the content is the same relative size as if it was a 1600 x 700 display. This is the same process used by iOS devices that went "Retina", same sized icons, just smoother rounded corners.
I think that's simplifying it. Everything in iOS looks great on that hi dpi screen, having that on a desktop would be great.
It has been maybe 15 years since I last looked at a screen and lamented how aliased some lines looked on it.
I see it every day and it would be nice to not have it there. We've been stuck at 1080p for far, far too long and it's way past time we started getting much higher resolutions on the desktop. It won't be fast, but we needed to start easily 5 years ago.
Yes I know that there is content like video and photos that will look beautiful @ 5000+ pixels, and I am sure there are apps that can use every pixel you can throw at it, but 99% of the time most users are going to simply be looking at a highly scaled up UI that is identical in physical dimensions to icons and buttons from the previous "low" res generation of screens, they just paid an *ssload more money for that privilege.
I doubt it will be an "assload" more. Apple is pretty good about introducing some very large improvements for not much more than its predecessor. Even selling a 27" iMac with a screen like this at $2500+ would be a pretty damn good deal. The current iMacs are relatively cheap for the display you get, and equivalent standalone monitor of that quality is around a grand. You can get a very powerful iMac for only $900 more and that's not a bad deal at all (depending on what you do of course).
Also, I question putting this on an iMac because iMac's are not notorious for offering high-end GPU options and if you hope to play any future game on this screen, at native resolution, then you are going to need like a 4-way SLI GPU configuration option from Apple.com. Unless you can add an external GPU through Thunderbolt which also daisy chains back to the internal iMac display, then I think most people are going to be frustrated trying to make full use of their iMac with an impressive waste of pixel count.
The only thing that matters is UI performance. Most games don't support past 1440p with good performance, and gaming in OS X is a complete waste of time. Apple isn't going to market this as a native res gaming platform and no one will even remotely expect them to. To game at 4k you need
at least an $8,000 gaming rig, and if you want to game at a solid 60fps at 4k you're talking closer to $10,000 to do it right (60hz V-sync locked). An iMac will never game at this resolution because it's simply not possible in that form factor, and trying to do so while running games in OS X is a fools errand. Gaming on a Mac is a complete waste of time if you're looking to play the types of games that would take advantage of a screen of that resolution. Even playing Dota 2 on my MBP in Mavericks has easily a 40% framerate deficit to running it in Windows through bootcamp. If you're going to want to game at a resolution like this is won't be with a machine like this, you'd be wasting your money.
Apple, just focus on making iMac affordable and/or come out with a headless Mac that doesn't cost as much as a used car and let people decide how many pixels they need to waste on a display of their choice.
They already have that, it's called a Mac Mini. And if gaming is their focus point, they aren't buying a Mac in the first place. It's simply not worth the time and money to do any serious high resolution gaming in OS X, the performance is just unacceptable at the price point. If they want a higher resolution screen with good performance for everyday stuff, the Mini fills that need. The iMac is for someone who wants an all-in-one with a really nice screen. Considering the screen you get when buying an iMac, you're getting a fantastic deal because the monitor is by far the majority of the cost and everything else is a downright steal when you look at it by component cost.
