Wtf why are the mags so low res

[SilentLoner]

Time mag the text is so low res on the iPad. Sort it out apple/time mag

 

[ATC]

Yeah it's frustrating. It's not Apple's fault, it's the magazines. My wife added a few magazine subscriptions (People mag, etc...) and they've all been horrible, both text and graphics are not retina material. The one magazine that seems to be retina-optimized is The Daily.

 

[JoeShades]

There are other retina magazines, maxim, tv guide , distro, American photo, trvl,and others

 

[Agent-P]

The retina iPad has been out for months now and it amazes me that big magazines such as Time magazine still haven't updated to take full advantage of all those pixels. You'd think they'd have somebody in charge of that.

 

[Michael CM1]

All the magazines made by Time's parent (AOL?) seem to at least have a crappy interface. I bought an SI issue and the actual magazine was fine, but the graphics in the app were not made for the retina display. Astronomy's app seems to be the same way, although not quite as bad. GQ and Popular Science are completely shiny.

 

[Elec]

The retina iPad has been out for months now and it amazes me that big magazines such as Time magazine still haven't updated to take full advantage of all those pixels. You'd think they'd have somebody in charge of that.

If they haven't optimized it for the iPad 3, it's because they felt the added cost to do so wouldn't be worth it. Right now there is only 1 retina level device, and even all the people using that device will still read their magazine as it is now. The magazine company isn't out there to make the customer happy unless there is profit involved.

So the question is, would they realistically see higher profits (after accounting for all costs) by raising the resolution of their magazines? Probably not, at least not right now.

 

[Greencardman]

It saves a lot of money just using PDF's from their regular production. Most of the magazines who have switched over to using HTML/CSS look pretty good on the iPad. But re-doing every issue in HTML is a pain and a lot of work. You can include a retina PDF, but it makes for a huge file size, so its hard to win.
I run an iPad travel magazine and we ran into the problem of our images just not being big enough. Not every travel writer carries an SLR, one carried an old point-and-shoot and the images were like 720 pixels wide! We couldn't even go full screen on the regular iPad.
So yeah, its not as easy as you think to figure things out, especially if you're designing for both dimensions, then you need even bigger images.