Might not be noticable to everyone, but I was standing at my normal distance away from the rMBP and the drop in picture quality is VERY noticable to me. I'm able to detect the blurness just going to google.com and glancing at the Google logo. The fact that all the elements around it are extremely crisp and sharp only makes it look even worse in contrast.
I would suggest that the problem isn't that it is blurry, but rather that it isn't as blurry as it is on the monitors we're more familiar with. With more space between pixels and larger pixels representing color, everything smooths out a little. A certain level of JPG compression vanishes into the background. On the RMBP the pixels are rendered more crisply and blemishes (such as the compression artifacts in a JPG graphic stand out more). Although if a graphic is resampled at higher dimensions that would introduce an element of blurriness. I'll have to check that out.
If you feel that crisp text is worth the trade off, then that's your decision and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. However as for me, I've never had a problem with text being too blur, and hence I'm not willing to sacrifice picture quality for sharper text.
Yeah, no point trying to convince me. Trying to change someone's mind is a fool's errand on the internet. Better just to share opinions and impressions and have a good conversation.
I value text more because it is the primary vessel for conveying useful information in most mediums. And I would argue that crisper text does a better job of conveying information (relative to the computer text we have grown accustomed to) than an image's ability to convey information is reduced by the small perceived quality loss of viewing it at a higher resolution than it was sized for (at least in this casethat statement would not be accurate in all cases). Icons lose more than other graphics, but the likes of a photograph loses nothing meaningful (but does have everything to gain).
And there's no way this is a temporary thing. For the iPad and iPhone, all apps are designed for specifically iOS and hence most get updated eventually as all iOS devices shift to the higher resolution. However websites cater to the entire world, and there's no easy way to optimize it for Retina MBPs without breaking it for everyone else.
Websites will be optimized as screens like this become more common place (and increasingly more in newly designed professional websites). And make no mistakehigh resolution screens are the future.
The later statementthat this can't be done without breaking things for everyone elseis incorrect. I'm a web designer and I've already thought of (and put to practice) numerous techniques to do just this. And before long the design community as a whole will form best practices for just these tasks which are easier to implement and degrade flawlessly.
Also FYI, even the Apple website with the pictures of the Retina MBP look awful when viewing it on one.
Just to humor you, I checked, and that's complete nonsense. They look incredible, just as one would expect from a properly sized high resolution graphic on this display (aside from that moment when you see the lower resolution variant before the high resolution swap out).
Are you using Safari? If you're using, say, Chrome, you won't see high resolution anything and everything will look a little crap (unless you're using one of the dev builds with Retina support).
