Samsung and LG Reportedly Quality Testing 'Retina' iPad Display Production for Apple

[Lennholm]

That won't work. The display itself is going to use the same amount of power. All the pixels are still going to be on whether they're doubled or not. The display doesn't know or care.

Maybe you save a little juice on the GPU side, but maybe not even actually, and I doubt it would matter much.

And to top it all off you have this configurable setting that seems to advertise to the user that the Retina display is a bad thing that drains their battery.

Is the individual pixels really a big part of the power consumption of a display, isn't it mainly the backlight and the gpu? The backlight would stay the same ofcourse, but halfing both the horizontal and vertical resolution of the display would cut the performance requirement of the gpu to a fourth. Isn't that were you would really be able to save power?

 

[jonnysods]

Please let it be so!

 

[GnillGnoll]

If you had an iPhone 3G/3GS and an iPhone 4 side by side, you could measure the Google logo and they would be exactly the same width and height on both displays, even though the iPhone 4 has quadruple the pixels. Both logos would look identical, even though one is scaled -- and I mean totally optically identical, even under a magnifying glass.

I like the rest of your explanation, but this part isn't true. You can see the impact of smaller pixels with bare eyes. Even pixel doubled content (which the Google logo would not be) doesn't look exactly identical. On the one hand you have the near-absence of the screen door effect (i.e. being able to see the gaps between subpixels as a mesh covering the image). On the other hand you have four separate subpixels of each primary colour per scaled pixel instead of one, which actually makes it look more square. less rounded.

Is the individual pixels really a big part of the power consumption of a display, isn't it mainly the backlight and the gpu? The backlight would stay the same ofcourse, but halfing both the horizontal and vertical resolution of the display would cut the performance requirement of the gpu to a fourth. Isn't that were you would really be able to save power?

Not really. Rendering at four times the resolution does not equal four times the power consumption, and unless you're playing 3D games the GPU is probably not sipping much anyway.

 

[JAT]

Jef Raskin, proponent of easier consumer computers and originator of the Mac project, claimed that:

Isn't that the same guy that once claimed XP and OSX were basically equivalent in GUI? Guess he never tried to switch between apps more than once on XP.

 

[kdarling]

Isn't that the same guy that once claimed XP and OSX were basically equivalent in GUI?

Yes, and he was absolutely correct within the context of which he was speaking... which was in comparison to a very different type of UI he designed and worked on until his death (and others took over):

The Humane User Interface

Even outside of that, UIs haven't changed all that much. We still mostly click on or select something in a certain order to make something else happen. Computers don't aid us that much in what we want to do, nor do they learn our habits (except perhaps our bad spelling habits - grin).

Thirty years ago we all thought we'd have AI help. Of course, we also thought we'd be living on the moon. So it goes.