Retina on OS X | Hacker News Reader

Retina on OS X

dcurt.is

18 pointskmfrk36 comments

I want a Retina Display Mac as badly as anyone, but I'm trying to not get my hopes up too much. Apple is famous for being secretive, even amongst themselves. They are also consistent with their design patterns in Cocoa. If/when the Retina Display comes to the iPad, it will almost certainly follow the @2x naming convention, and the Mac will almost certainly follow it as well.

This could just as easily mean the design teams at Apple are simply being well-prepared for whenever a Retina Display Mac does come, even if it's years away.

Out of curiosity, what is the cursor of the hand giving 'the shocker' used for?

Are you guys seeing different images than I am, or is this a gesture from a non-US, non-California location? I see the image with the pointer finger extended, and the thumb out to the side, with the rest of the fingers folded. (For a second I thought by "shocker" you means some lightning bolt icon, but I don't see that either.)

That's a good question. I thought it was just the link pointer, but I pointed at a link and the actual pointer only had the index finger extended. But according to Wikipedia, the actual gesture doesn't use the thumb.

(Also, I really did not need to know there was a hand gesture for that.)

It's the "pan" or "move" hand that you'll see in preview if you zoom an image and select the move tool. It's fingers are meant to be evenly spaced, but are optimized for display on pixel arrays (LCD displays).

Which image is doing the shocker?

That has to be a joke.

no joke, I'm also a little confused.

HiDPI mode is already here. You can enable it today if your monitor is sufficiently large, and see these large images in action for yourself. There's no need to go digging around app package resources and speculate about what's coming.

Does anyone know what those panels cost compared to the old ones? Is a 13 inch or a 15 inch panel more likely to show up first? Is a 13 inch panel even feasible?

2880x1800 is seriously crazy, that would be 255 ppi on a 13 inch screen, 50 ppi more than previous commercially available and extremely expensive high-ppi screens (excluding really small screens for phones and the like), like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Is it even possible to build those panels with the same thinness that they would fit? Oh, and will Ivy Bridge be able to deal with that kind of screen? If not, we can be fairly certain that there will be no Retina MacBook Air. There is just no space for a dedicated GPU on that logic board.

Hm, I guess if a Retina iPad is possible (263 ppi, by the way, and that one seems like a certainty) then a 13 inch screen can’t be all that harder. And if the iPad hardware can deal with that screen (presumably while keeping the battery runtime, performance and size the same – I can’t imagine Apple sacrificing any of that) a desktop GPU – even an integrated one – should be able to deal with it, too.

The price will be interesting, too. It seems inconceivable that Apple will be able to sell a Retina iPad for $500. The current iPad has an IPS screen and that – the high quality screen with wide viewing angles – is one of its headline features. The next iPad would then also have to have an IPS Panel that is of the same or better quality and also Retina. I’m looking forward to see how Apple will deal with that. (The same applies to the Mac, too.)

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/10/ces-2012-panasonics-20-i...

Panasonic showed a 3840x2160 20" screen at CES at 216dpi. 3.5mm thin. No word of pricing, but the technology seems to exist.

Also 2880x1800 would be the 15" size, not the 13" size. Since it's double the 15" MBP's linear resolution.

The 13 inch MBA and the 15 inch MBP have identical resolutions, so 2880x1800 would be the resolution of both MacBooks. (The 13 inch MBP lags behind for whatever reason – but it’s kind of useless and a waste of space in Apple’s lineup anyway.)

That's interesting. I know a lot of web designers that use macs primarily and I wonder how having such a high default resolution would impact their design choices. Could this 'break the web' as people around here are so fond of saying for non high resolution screen users?

I doubt that the new macs will have higher effective resolutions. Everything will be very sharp but will remain the same size, just like on the iPhone. This can't break the web, it will simply raise the ceiling on how good a website can look.

Except that designers might want to include 4x-sized bitmap assets to have their sites appear sharp on those retina displays. If that isn't done carefully, users with smaller displays might have to download those, wasting their bandwidth.

Hmm, yes, especially if the designers are working on such a large resolution screen.

Would the solution be a media query in the CSS? Would there be data in the HTTP user agent string to serve up a different CSS/HTML/image resource?

Apple introduced the -webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2 media query parameter with the iPhone 4. But for HTML images that doesn't help

only if you're running mac os x on your browser

Does anyone have any idea how well retina display MacBooks work for Windows and Linux? AFAIK Windows have resolution independence but can they display hi res system UI? Or will everything just become smaller?

From my experience everything on linux will become smaller. More user-centric linux's like Ubuntu might have resolution independence though.

If it really happens, Windows and Linux users will probably have no choice if they want retina display laptop. At least for a few years.

The icons will become smaller, but font sizes are already keyed off of the DPI.

In my quest of the perfect screen for coding +8 hours a day Retina is good news. BUT as Anti-Glare filter are too grainy, there will surely be only glossy screen (headache in bright rooms). :(

Relative predicted timings between Ivy Bridge release and full OS X "retina" capability? To wit, odds of next 27" iMac having that resolution? and when? Just chomping at the bit for one...

A 27" retina display would be 5120x2880; this seems pretty far beyond the state of the art. I'm not even sure eDP could drive it.

Or that they are just sharing resources between OSX and iOS apps. As much as I'd love to have higher resolution displays, I don't think this is as strong a signal as this article is claiming.

Some of the assets are mouse cursors. Unlikely we are going to see iOS mouse support, so that does suggest mac retina displays

It's been really, really annoying in the past 4-5 years as monitor resolutions came to a grinding halt at 1920x1080 (ie, HD video). There's not much point buying a larger monitor if the resolution doesn't keep pace.

Hopefully Apple can serve their usual task of kicking all the other electronics manufacturers out of a rut.

Here are some details about the upcoming IPS screens: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archive/25.htm#new_lgdispla...

My 2560x1600 HP monitor disagrees with you. (Affording it is a different matter.) The trend of replacing 16:10 monitors with lower-res 16:9 models is disturbing, though.

But what size is that screen? That’s the problem.

Screen sizes have increased (or rather: it’s now affordable to buy a larger screen). A 27 inch panel with your resolution has the same old and boring ppi like a 17 inch screen with 1600x900 pixels.

The screens Apple seems to want to build into their Macs would double that ppi count. That’s what would be great.

A smaller, higher-DPI monitor displays less information; all those extra pixels just make things sharper. Sure, I'd like a sharper screen but I'm not giving up real estate for it. If Apple comes out with a 30" retina display I'll be all over it, but I know they won't.

Huh? That makes no sense. People don’t pick small displays over large displays just because. They pick them because they make for an attractive package. It’s all tradeoff, don’t you understand?

I'd be happy with higher-res 23" monitors, because I like to use them in a portrait orientation.

I suppose I should have been clearer.

Higher res monitors are available, but almost all of them are Apple monitors for Apple computers. Monitors from other manufacturers basically sprinted up to 1920x1080 because that was enough for HD.

Now monitors are being sold by size and price. That is, they're being used as TVs you attach to a PC.

What I want is the old arms race back. I want people to brag about the new super-duper res monitor they just bought. Companies to announce incremental improvements every few months.

That's not really true anymore. I run mostly DELL U2711 monitors (2560x1440 on a 27" panel), and it's been available since 2009. Before that, I used (and still use some) DELL 30-inch monitors (2560x1600, 30").

It's true that there are more low-res monitors in the market, but that's just because they cost a lot less. I haven't used a monitor less than 2560 pixels across for six or seven years, and the last Apple monitor I bought was in 2007.

EDIT: but I too would welcome a resolution arms race. I moved from the 30s to the 27s because the pixel density is slightly better... but it's a very modest improvement for all the time that's passed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com