Mac OS X Lion Building in Support for Super High Resolution 'Retina' Monitors

[QuarterSwede]

Nope, I'm in my early 30s also. I can't stand low DPI. 130 is just barely good enough, 160 would be better at normal viewing distances. I drool each time I see a Sony Vaio Z... I jumped on the MBA for one reason alone, the screen.

Again, as long as RI allows us Screen real-estate fanatics to get our way and you blind people to get yours, I'm all for it. If however I have to sacrifice my UI scaling when getting higher DPI screens, then count me in the against camp.

Apple needs to stop supporting pixel based image formats for the UI and just switch everything to SVG.

You probably have good-great near near field eye sight though. I'll be 30 this year (ugh) and am nearsighted so I notice lower DPI extremely well. Heck, at times (not often) I can barely make out pixels on my iPhone 4 (326dpi). It's only for a split second and I have to strain to see them but I can. Looking at a 3GS's screen is almost painful it's so awful in comparison.

Point is, age has little to do with it other than a lot of older people get far sighted. It's really all about how well you see up close.

 

[exabytes18]

WTF? 15" and 17" MBP already has some of the most high density display around.

No.

 

[fdv]

The problem is getting everything and everybody on board. RI is nice to have but if at first 80% of all apps will look horribly broken, nobody will use it. And tell me, what is the modification date of the oldest app you semi-regularly use? I would guess it is a couple of years. Do you want to live with several years of horribly broken apps?

It hasn't been too much of a problem with the iPhone 4...most apps have been updated now, and it hasn't even been out for a year. And the whole point of doubling the resolution rather than just increasing it to some other arbitrary number is so you can run apps that aren't updated with pixel doubling so they are the right size on the screen.

This is definitely a step in the right direction...eventually I'd like to see all screens, whether TVs, phones, computers, with resolutions higher than the human eye can discern, with completely scalable and resolution independent UIs, so everybody is happy. If you want lots of screen real-estate, just make everything tiny. If you can't read anything, just make everything big. It's not that hard to do this and still let everybody enjoy the benefits of super high res screens. Once this is achieved, I can't imagine any reasons to increase resolutions further for most screens, and the tech world can focus their efforts other areas, like hurrying up and making the Corning/Tony Stark house a reality

 

[KnightWRX]

Point is, age has little to do with it other than a lot of older people get far sighted. It's really all about how well you see up close.

I'm not the one who brought up age though. I just find it shortsighted that Apple would only have to cater to the blind amongst us. What about people with good eyesight that just want to pack in more ?

High DPI should not just be about displaying the same old content in a sharper form. Let the UI scale. Vector graphics have been around in forever and are by their nature resolution independente.

 

[ten-oak-druid]

They better fix the itunes' icon before they increase the resolution.

 

[camelsnot]

funny as this has been an ongoing development for the past 3 years by most manufacturers to deliver this and will be supported by all the major OS'. This isn't just Mac news. It's definitely bigger than that.

 

[tsalomoni]

I was going to buy my first mac, the 13 low end MBP, but the redesign was very important to me, i didn`t want to buy a mac that will be getting a complete redesign in 9 months or less. I don´t needed since i have a 6 months old hp with great specs, i just wanted to buy a mac but i believe i`ll be waiting for the next generation MBP

 

[InfoTime]

I hate Macrumors' bias. Seriously, right now, in Windows, you can use "resolution independence" to drive a "retina" display, without ANY extra work on the programming side. The OS scales everything itself!

Hardly. You have three choices: 1x, 1.25x, or 1.50x. And both 1.25x and 1.50x look horribly broken because apps (including even freaking Windows Explorer!) are not designed to work with them.

This is exactly the sort of thing that has caused Apple to disable resolution independence in every OS release since Tiger.

Exactly! Not only does it look bad, things go horribly wrong too. One client was running the latest version of Quickbooks Pro 2011 on his new Windows 7 machine. He couldn't figure out why every time he tried to open the Help window it would disappear. After some investigation I determined that having his DPI at 150% or 125% confused the crap out of Quickbooks. It tries to resize your main window and put the help window off to the side. Set it back to normal DPI and all is fine.

 

[ghostlyorb]

Can't wait.. but this is still a couple years away? Or maybe it will come out to support Thunderbolt.

 

[pascalhos]

Perhaps instead of these super high resolution monitors this is really more related to scaling full screen apps on all the different screen sizes. I assume that apple wants the application to look the same on a 13" MacBook pro and a 27" iMac. I personally am having a hard time envisioning some of these full screen applications on my 27" iMac.

Anyway, just my 2c.

 

[mixel]

i'd personally take resolution/clarity in some situations and real-estate in others, probably.. I can imagine switching between the modes for different things. I mean we have spaces and expose for laptops and multiple display support.. I have two 1920 x 1200 displays on my iMac.. it wouldn't matter what PPI they were I'd "need" the dual monitor setup.. I like to work on one full screen thing (usually photoshop) while the other screen does IM, etc etc. The Photoshop UI elements are good sizes already and I wouldn’t want everything 1/2 size.. the canvas would be beauuuutiful with 2x res. Mmmm.

It'd be awesome if you could have two super high pip screens and set one to use big UI elements and the other to use small ones. Or set big/small on a application basis. (wow actually that WOULD be amazing. iTunes could do with shrinking)

Some programs i wish i could just scale them in a resolution independent way though. Hold ctrl and scale the window but actually have it scale the contents too.. Obviously the precedent is there for that sort of window scaling as they use it for all the expose/genie transitions and so on.. if you load a lot of stuff up then do expose show all windows it's amazing how usable a lot of things would be *right now* if it was scaled to 50% even without res independence.

 

[JGowan]

Ohh, the "Retina" madness is just beginning...

I can't tell if you're being negative? Retina is not MADNESS — it's awesome to be getting higher and higher resolutions especially now that Apple is building in this support for "super high resolution retina monitors". I'm nothing but excited the future with Apple.

 

[ahbiteme]

Perfect. I'm waiting to buy a new Mac Mini Server to run a website/mailing list and start a wiki, but also to plug it into my new HDTV via HDMI to play movies, etc.

Bring on the next Mac Mini update with sensational graphics along with OS X Lion Server (which is looking pretty decent) and I'll be buying. Saving now.

 

[carlgo]

My secret source at Apple tells me the screens will be 3D and the content will simply be projected out closer to your eyes so it is easier to read.

A sensor on the screen will determine how far away the viewer is.

You will be able to read this, for example, from around ten feet away, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

 

[Jensend]

Give me the names of companies producing screens in 10in or 20in sizes with 350+dpi resolutions? Yes we know the small iphone screens exist, but the cost factor and failure rate on larger screens make them prohibitively expensive.

Very few of us pay $1000 for a 27" display with 2560 resolution, how many would pay $1000 or more for a 17 in laptop screen with the same resolution?

Don't forget about a GPU capable of pushing all those pixels quickly and w/o using much power as well! That will cost a premium.

And lastly - how long has it taken us to go from 640x480 to 2560x1440? 20 years! From 1280x1024 to 2560x1440 is about 15 years. Going from 2560x1440 to 5120x2880 may well take another 10 or at the very least 5.

I'm not saying it will NEVER happen, just that it will not happen in 2011. Cost has to become much lower before larger screens with double resolution

I think the fact that resolution increases have been slower than computer power increases means that there is potential for a big leap.

AMD already has a video card that can display 7680X3200 across 6 ports (under $200 on newegg right now)

Display port 1.2 already supports 3840 x 2400, which is enough to pixel double any consumer computer monitor out there except the 27" and 30" models. IBM made a monitor of that resolution almost 10 years ago (super expensive then, but it didn't have economies of scale, and 10 years is a long time for technology)

 

[dime21]

It's funny, all this talk of resolution independence and yet OSX is the only major desktop OS where you cannot change the size of the system font!! You know, the font for the menu bar across the top of the screen, and other assorted menus and dialog boxes. You can't change it!! Stupid!! I have a brand new Mac Mini attached to my Sony XBR 1080p television, yet I have to keep it set to 720p. Why? Because at 1080p, the menus are too tiny, I can't read them from the couch, even with my glasses on. And did I mention that you can't change the system font size?!!?!?!?! They better fix this crap in Lion.

 

[keruah]

Hey, what about the Web? It must be svg all over the place otherwise it will look ugly (stretched or tiny)

 

[grs]

Thanks for the sarcasm. Now go back and see how many comments referred to 2x resolution rather than 4x resolution.

Good grief, Captain Obvious, we've all been through elementary school math too.

 

[PatrickCocoa]

Sanity

Err.. what's wrong with black bars ? 1920x1200 is better than 1920x1080 by 120 vertical pixels. More stuff on screen.

Again, let's not make monitors 16:9 because of "black bars". Who gives a crap about black bars. Most video content isn't 16:9 anyhow and has black bars even on 16:9 screens.

It's great to meet someone else who is sane on this topic. The black bars seem to trigger some sort of lizard-brain "you stole my pixels" reaction in everyone else.

 

[PatrickCocoa]

Seriously

I hate Macrumors' bias. Seriously, right now, in Windows, you can use "resolution independence" to drive a "retina" display, without ANY extra work on the programming side. The OS scales everything itself!

Seriously, right now, in Windows, you can use "hamburger independence" to drive a "George Forman grill", without ANY extra work on the programming side. The OS cooks everything itself!

 

[MacFly123]

Am I the only one left on this earth who buys monitors with higher pixel counts to fit more information on the screen, not to make things "sharper" ? I like the way it works now, more pixels = smaller fonts, smaller pictures, smaller everything so more of it shows up.

My MBA still has huge pixels and could use a higher DPI screen and shrink everything so I can display more.



Ah, great, apparently I'm not the only one. There's still hope yet.

I couldn't agree LESS!!!

Apple righted a wrong in iOS on this front that has persisted for 30 years and now they are bringing it BACK TO THE MAC! After owning an iPhone 4 I can testify... once you go retina, you never go back!

As a film-maker the only thing I want to go with this future era of retina screens now is 4k video!

 

[DickKnowsBest]

Before apple moves onto higher retina display monitors, they should first focus on one thing and one thing only... trying to get all their product line consistent with the same DPI.

It's really annoying when you have so many different weird resolutions, but more so, ppi ranges. (pixels per inch)

the 17" MBP has a ppi of 133.
the 11.6" MBA has 135 ppi
the 13" MBA has 127 ppi
the 13" MBP has 113 ppi.
the 27" iMac has 109 ppi
the iphone has 329 ppi
the ipad has 131 ppi

Not only this, but apple have not 3, but 4 different aspect ratios for their products. 16:9 (iMac, 11.6" MBA) 16:10 (13/15/17" MBP) 16:12 (iPad) and 3:2 (iPhone)
I understand having 16:12 (4:3) on the iPad, but 16:9 for their macbooks and iMacs? Why have 16:9 if they already have 16:10 with the other half of their product line? And what is with the weird 3:2 iPhone aspect ratio? that is crazy! In my opinion of course. 16:9 is fine, but not for professional machines.

I know apple don't manufacture their own displays, but they must be able to find a way to fix this.

Here's an example of what I think they should do... remember, just an example.

iPhone 3.9" 960x600 - 290ppi (I HATE 3:2, it's not compatible with anything!)
iPad 10.4" 2560x1600 - 290ppi (or the same PPI but in 4:3 aspect ratio)

Macbook Air 11.7" - 1440x900 - 145ppi
Macbook Air/Pro 13.0" - 1600x1000 - 145ppi
Macbook Pro 15.6" 1920x1200 - 145ppi

iMac 20.8" 2560x1600 - 145ppi
iMac 31.2" 3840x2400 - 145ppi

They could then introduce resolution independency. e.g. 15.6" MBP 1920x1200 you can downsize the theoretical resolution of the display to 1760x1100, 1600x1000, 1440x900, 1280x800 etc...
Thus, making everything larger, without losing resolution, in case you can't read text so small or don't need so much screen real estate.

So you could have a 31.2" iMac (or cinema display) with 3840x2400. If you sit about 2 feet from the screen and can't read the text at the native (virtual) 3840x2400 resolution, you could then adjust the virtual resolution to something around the same size as 2560x1600, giving you less real estate, but easier to read text etc... Then, if you decide to move the screen closer to your face, you could adjust the virtual resolution to 3200x2000, giving you more real estate, but not straining your eyes so much since the display is closer.

Funny, I have pretty much described Resolution Independency itself, but nethertheless, my one wish is to have a 15" 1920x1200 MBP and a 3840x2400 30" iMac. Though, I think anything more than 150ppi for a notebook/desktop display is a waste of pixels, unless you are going to be only 6 inches from the screen. And if you do that you are probably in a very uncomfortable and dangerous (for your spine) seating position anyway. 3840x2400 on a 15" screen is a waste of precious GPU power. And we all know how outdated the GPU's are that apple ships in their Macbooks and iMacs.

I need to do more research on this, but I am sure 150ppi is the max you would want for a notebook/desktop. Go into any tech store and try find a Sony Vaio Z. There is a 13.1" model with a 1920x1080 display at 168ppi. Sit about 9 inches from the screen and tell me if you see a single pixel.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[ozred]

Even more reason to wait for 2012.

 

[SandynJosh]

Perhaps instead of these super high resolution monitors this is really more related to scaling full screen apps on all the different screen sizes. I assume that apple wants the application to look the same on a 13" MacBook pro and a 27" iMac. I personally am having a hard time envisioning some of these full screen applications on my 27" iMac.

Anyway, just my 2c.

I've only encountered one application so poorly written that it wants to blow itself up to fill the whole 27" screen. The particular app insists on it's information windows also overlay the application rather then be able to be placed outside of it.

Meanwhile I enjoy all the applications that allow me to resize their windows and enlarge their text and graphics as I wish or need.

What I see from the what it seems Apple is aiming at is for that range of scaling to be much broader than before...smaller without loss of detail, or larger without the jaggies coming up too soon.

This should be welcomed by us that can't tell of a coin at 100 feet is a dime or quarter, and those of us that can even see that it is heads or tails.

 

[SandynJosh]

Before apple moves onto higher retina display monitors, they should first focus on one thing and one thing only... trying to get all their product line consistent with the same DPI.

It's really annoying when you have so many different weird resolutions, but more so, ppi ranges. Bla, bla, bla, ad infinitum...

I'll bet it bothers you all to pieces that the letters of OCD are not in alphabetical order too.