All iPads Retina display - employee knowledge?

Maybe he was thinking in terms of 720p vs 1080p? I don't think the retina mini does 1080p..

 

Technically, he was correct. It's not HD. It's better than HD.

But I think he could have explained that better.

 

Why on earth would you think that when the rMini display has more pixels than 1080p? 2048x1536 > 1920x1080

http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/specs/

 

In general, "these days" I find apple store employee to be average at best. Sure they might know a bit more, but that's probably because of some training video they are asked to sit through.

Whenever I go with my wife to the mall, I usually like to swing by the apple store to see if there are anything new. I've heard some pretty stupid/funny things told by the apple employee to the customer. Then again, I don't know if I can really blame them, as they are there to sell things rather than really helping somebody out.

 

Agreed, many employees have average knowledge at best, and sometimes make the mistake of piecing together an answer instead of admitting they don't know. But to your last statement, this is 100% incorrect, Apple retail employees sell things as a result of helping somebody out, big difference.

 

You seem to be confused. That Apple employee was correct. Retina means you can't see the pixels at normal holding distance. The term made up by Apple makes no claim about what the resolution is. Just like saying 60 frames per second doesn't mean the video is HD.

 

For text and vector based images, they will not blur no matter how much you zoom in. Only raster based images (jpg, videos for example) will blur when you zoom in.

 

And THIS is why the employee probably decided to oversimplify.

 

Well, although I think he/she didn't give the best answer I would stay away from judging the employees. Reason? Well I worked for Apple before and you have no idea how far you need to go in order for the average customers to understand the tech stuff. Sometimes you have to go so basic and the customer still says that he/she doesn't get it so you then try to find an answer that might give them some clue.
You get customer that asks you what is the "file system" on her mac and how does it work. First you ask her few questions and then you realise she has no background so explaining it normally doesn't work. So, I tried this:
Imagine a big wardrobe in your room that stores a lot of things inside - that is your "hard drive"
So, when you open that wardrobe, you will see 4 big draws (those are your main folders - The first one is for your documents the second for your pics etc.
Now, when you open the draw for your documents you might then have those documents sorted in different categories like documents "for the bank", "the house", "work" etc. etc. and you can organise things as much as you like.

All that was explained very slowly and visually on her computer and she was in charge of it each step. 1) wardrobe = hdd, 2) 4xdraws = folders 3) categorised documents = more folders related to documents 4) individual papers = files

She still didn't understand it and so I went to try different thing until she would eventually get a VERY "rough" idea that would start to give her some light into that topic but I realised she would need way more lessons to get it but eventually I think she did.

Now, its so hard to judge when you hear someone saying something quite "incorrect" but sometimes there might be a background to the information or reason to why its said the way it is.
Nevertheless, I've heard some of my colleagues saying bad stuff either and I corrected them. We can't know everything and its often the new employees that are still learning that might say more incorrect stuff but can you blame them? Apple doesn't pay that much so you can't always expect excellence.

 

While I don't disagree with your last statement, and as a matter of fact I just remembered I've actually read about that before.

There has been a few times that I have notice the employee by ways of (might not be on purpose) presenting the information in a certain fashion which caused the customer to purchase a particular item, one that I think it's really suitable for their need. I agree they are there to answer question (or help out), but I also know there are certainly ways to "answer question" which could promote a sell. To say that the employees are 100% there "just to help out", I find that a bit hard to believe.

They are not pushy, that I'll give you.

 

Most regular consumers don't know what HD actually means. If that person knew what HD is. That employee was reading from Apple's "how to explain retina displays to regular people" handbook.

 

the whole HD chatter is something that is a big marketing gimmick in the 1st place. not everyone understands it. If he said yes it's HD, then you're going to get into a big conversation about 720p, 1080p, what's 1080i? what about 4k sir, is it 4k?

his/her way of explaining it left it and no more silly questions about HD. There are people that are so picky when it comes to HD that if he answered it incorrectly they may not be interested.

My father in law is one of those people. He's always talking about HD and how he has to have 1080p etc. Always sizing up people's HD and TV to his own. He doesn't own a blu ray player and we all know that content doesn't stream in 1080p yet from most cable providers. Yet, he is STUCK on having to have 1080p. He can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, but he's stuck on that marketing gimmick of having to have 1080p. He thinks everything he is watching is 1080p bc his tv says it's 1080p.

The employee's answer was a good one....

 

I agree with OP, the answer was not in any way related to what Retina means. Retina display refers to the amount of pixels per inch (or whether you can distinguish said pixels), it has NOTHING to do with text or vector images not blurring. Zooming in on text didn't blur it on an iPad 2 either, the difference with the Retina display is that the same text would be sharper.

In Apple-speak, Retina absolutely does mean HD. And even if it wasn't the equivalent of HD, the whole zooming-in-without-blurring thing is completely irrelevant to what Retina is. The employee should have either agreed with the customer and called Retina the equivalent of HD, or explained that there are four pixels for every one pixel in a Retina display, thus making it sharper.

 

then the person looks at you cross eyed bc they don't understand the language lol

 

Not really, the person clearly knew what HD was, so the employee could have easily played off that. "Yes, Retina display is the equivalent of HD, it makes your text and images sharper." End of story.

But telling them that a Retina display equals infinite zooming into images and text is completely false. Even if that was true (and it's not, because most images are raster) it has nothing to do with Retina. Like, you'd have to exclusively stare at one of those iPad posters with the magnifying loupe in order to derive such a false conclusion about what Retina is.

 

read what i wrote above. Then the next thing would be, is it 420p, 720p, 1080p, 1080i, 4k? What kind of HD? Where does it fall between all those? How does this compare to HD on my tv. would be an endless conversation

 

That's not a good excuse for giving false answers. You could leave the HD moniker out of it completely. How hard is it to explain to a person that Retina displays are sharper than non-Retina displays? Here are two iPad mini's, one is Retina, and therefore sharper than the other one. One contains double the amount of pixels than the other one. Why would you go talking about zooming into text unless you were completely clueless as to what Retina is?

 

Retina means the font is so small you have to literary smash the device into your retina to be able to read it.

 

bc the average consumer wouldn't understand man. the person asked if it was HD so how are you going to all the sudden leave that out? how do you know the person didn't move along and show the customer? Did this guy follow them around the store the entire time waiting for him to answer correctly?

This is all from someone over hearing a conversation. who knows what was actually said.

 

If someone has to ask if retina is HD, they are clueless. So you either go into a discussion of 720p, 1080i and p, and all the retina resolutions and the distance from your face they have to be to be retina, or you actually sell something.