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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

Retina is a very interesting example for how Apple works. They have identified the necessary resolution (200+ ppi) for this technology and worked towards across their whole product range. The technology isn't exclusive to Apple, but they are the only company which pushes it, even if it sometimes means quite odd display resolutions.

Other manufacturers seem to be completely oblivious to it. They still equip their laptops either with full hd or 4k screens. The resulting ppi are all over the place. Sometimes way to low (bad quality) or way to high (4k in an 13" laptop, halves the runtime). Same with standalone screens, there is a good selection around 100ppi, but for "high res" the manufacturers just offer 4k in whatever size, so once again the ppi are all over the place again.

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Retina is a great example of how Apple operates in general. They care about outcomes, not spec sheets. Sure, they'll take the time to spec dunk when the opportunity presents itself. It's just rarely the reason they do something, whereas Dell/HP/whatever want to say "4K SCREEN OMG" on the box regardless of whether that actually leads to a better experience.

Apple realizes there's diminishing returns in upping the resolution beyond what your eyes can see. So they hit Retina, and then move on to focus on color accuracy, brightness, and contrast.

They do this throughout their product stack. Only as much RAM as their phones actually need, because RAM is both costly in terms of BOM and also consumes battery life.

Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

> Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

When your customers are picking a product based off a spec sheet, that's the trap you easily fall into.

> Apple realizes there's diminishing returns in upping the resolution beyond what your eyes can see. So they hit Retina, and then move on to focus on color accuracy, brightness, and contrast.

It's still not enough resolution for x2 upscaling that Apple argues optimal.

> The technology isn't exclusive to Apple, but they are the only company which pushes it, even if it sometimes means quite odd display resolutions.

Apple's focus and commitment can be a pain to users who want something different, but overall it's a huge strategic advantage.

Software developers are building their apps for M1 because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Apple isn't going to keep Intel around any longer than they have to, whereas Microsoft had and will continue to have a hard time persuading anyone to adopt ARM Windows because the opposite is true.

That would imply split-brain development. Yes I agree that devs will support M1 out of necessity in supporting a minority market share OS that will expand from M1's apparent superiority....

But Wintel will own business desktops for probably a decade, unfortunately.

> But Wintel will own business desktops for probably a decade, unfortunately.

Do you see this as being different from what was going on pre-M1?

Aside from shared math libraries, seems like most stuff required cross compilation just to work - I’m not clear that M1 adds more work on top of that.

There are a few PC manufacturers offering 3K laptops at least (Lenovo, Huawei when I looked). For monitors it’s nuts, just Iiyama has a 5k screen with multiple inputs (the LG has only one input so useless for switching between pc and Mac)

Perhaps I'm lucky, but my LG 5K has aged really well. Fantastic upgrade in 2016 and still going strong. I'm surprised there aren't more 5K 27" monitors because they are great.

Personally, I hope Dell makes their own screen with the panel of the 6k Apple display. I would probably grab it in a heartbeat. I would consider the Apple display, but I don't need the reference video quality and especially I would like to have more than one input on a display that expensive.

Apple, what are you thinking? People who can afford that display might want to connect their desktop mac and their laptop to it.

8k TVs are imminent. The only real market for these with their detail only apparent up close is PC monitors and gaming.

Dell Inspiron 8000 serie was released in 2000 with 15 inch 1600x1200 screen resolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_laptops

That's about 130+ish dpi and it was unmatched for years: I know I had one and was depressed to see dpi do down and down afterwards :)

Hopefully Apple restarted the dpi race.

I have a Chromebook with a 2400x1600 display. Not one of the standard resolutions, but it is 200-some ppi.

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