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Duncan C

macrumors 6502a
Jan 21, 2008
853
0
Northern Virginia
Why can't all iPhones and iPads just use a 144x144 retina-display icon?

Because that's not how it works.

Something as small as an icon looks best when it's customized for the specific target resolution. A 72x72 icon scaled down to 57x57 does not look as good as an icon made for the 57x57 resolution.

There's also the issue of memory and performance. Scaling images takes more memory and CPU power than displaying the image at full size, since the original image has to be loaded and then re-drawn at the smaller size.

Images do scale to exactly 50% well (retina to non-retina), but that's slow and memory-intensive.
 
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