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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.

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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

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