Can we please stop using the silly Apple marketing gimmick "retina display" yet?
It's a high-DPI display. Lots of devices have it. Lets not attempt to pretend there's anything Apple-specific about that.
It's a high-DPI display. Lots of devices have it. Lets not attempt to pretend there's anything Apple-specific about that.
If people really hated Apple marketing, they probably should be ecstatic at the idea of one of their trademarks becoming genericized.
(in fact, even more confusingly, most zip() functions don't interleave elements, like zippers do, but return a sequence of paired tuples - this, naturally, gives Zippers a bad name who wants their pants to pairwise join)
Two which surprised me were Ping Pong and Adrenaline.
The name "ping-pong" was in wide use before British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901. (Wikipedia)
So in this sense, I would claim there is a clear technical difference between just higher-resolution screens (more pixels) and retina displays (same pixels but "better looking").
To me this virtualization of pixels seems like a good idea, since the majority of web pages assume pixels have certain DPI range. Operating systems like OSX treat pixels as floats anyway, so if you need subpixel accuracy, it's still possible.
"Retina" is just a marketing term for "pixels so small your eye can't distinguish them at a normal distance anymore".
[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units
See also http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx (been featured on HN some time ago)
Your interpretation is a fine one, but it's not the one that everyone shares. Specifically, it's not the sense that Apple uses the term either. Take a look at Apple's marketing page for the retina display and see if you can find anything about "resolution independence" at all.
Intel played a similar trick about 8 years ago with "Centrino". The advertising (for what was essentially just a 802.11b chipset with some added processor/chipset requirements) was so successful that many novice users got fooled into thnking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
Really? Both the claim that many users were "fooled" by the Centrino branding and that this hurt the market for Wi-Fi devices seem highly implausible to me. I don't think I heard anyone use the term "Centrino" outside of Intel PR and reporting thereupon, whereas Wi-Fi had made it into the vernacular at least a decade ago.
The only other trademark for the 802.11 series of standards that got any traction at all was Apple's AirPort, and even their OS calls it Wi-Fi now.
(edit: your remark about AirPort makes this clearer on reflection: you were a mac user at the time, and familiar with Apple products much more than PCs. Outside the mac world, as you might expect, literally no one had heard of an "AirPort". So you were insulated from Intel's nonsense, essentially.)
It's the same thing here. We have "retina.js" being pushed around as a solution for what is clearly a manufacturer-independent problem. Yet on it's face it appears to be Apple-only software. You don't think that constitutes harm to the market?
Apple introduced laptops with Wi-Fi (calling it "AirPort") in 1999, five years before your "eight years ago". Starbucks first started rolling out Wi-Fi (calling it "Wi-Fi")in 2001, and had most of their stores offering it by 2003. It was not an obscure technology eight years ago.
I'm sure whenever non-geeks go shopping for a computer, in any era, there are a variety of marketing terms that need to be explained to them. And yes, I'm old enough to have run through that exercise a few times. But that's not really evidence that "Centrino" hurt the growth of Wi-Fi any more than the way-more-prevalent "Pentium" branding hurt the '90-'00's highly competitive CPU market that gave us 2+GHz x86-64's.
Wi-Fi adoption rates were exceptional for a new computing technology, especially one that required infrastructure beyond what could be put "in the box".
Just like Apple was a couple of years ahead of the curve on Wi-Fi and called it AirPort, they're a couple of years ahead of the curve on double-res displays, too. I don't see how them putting the name "Retina" on those displays (while even in the OS they're still calling it Hi-DPI!) is going to harm what's surely going to be an explosion of high resolution screens in the next few years.
To get a Centrino sticker, a laptop had to use an Intel chipset, Intel wireless adapter and Intel CPU. Because the marketing for Centrino focussed almost exclusively on Wifi capability, there were many laptops with non-Intel chipsets or AMD CPUs that were perceived by customers as not being capable of wireless networking.
This article[1] explains how Wi-Fi wasn't very popular until the Centrino campaign.
[1]: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/04/inte...
Anyway, I'm perfectly content to believe that Centrino and Intel's multimillion dollar marketing campaign for it really helped the growth of Wi-Fi. The parent post claimed the opposite: That the branding "hurt the market" for Wi-Fi, which seems absurd.
It's why we have brands and markets. So we can associate them with _something_ and move on from terms such as 486DX 33Mhz.
People want to buy an "iPads", not the Apple K48 tablet (the internal name for the first iPad.
... And when I bought a laptop in 2005, yes, I did buy a "Centrino" one because I knew the Intel Wifi chipset combination was compatible with Linux.
... And Intel put out some other requirements and called them "Ultrabooks".
Now, we still have a way to go before high ppi displays are ubiquitous, but there you have one example at least :)
That said, there is nothing gimmicky about the retina name. It's a device where distance to the display, resolution and screen size are such that someone with normal vision cannot distinguish between pixels.
High-PPI does not in any way pack the same information. It’s ambiguous and unclear.
The only thing that’s bad about retina is that Apple uses it like a trademark. I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays (because they are), but that’s not possible. Luckily everyone else is busy taking away that name from Apple (for example by naming their software like that).
It is a post-development sales pitch used to pitch as a differentiation the fact that Apple's naive scaling required them to grossly overshoot the mark. Competitive products already had excellent displays before Apple decided that they had no choice but catch up.
I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays
Why would you love it? "Retina" display is a misnomer -- unless the device is a fixed distance from my eyes, and it is specifically geared for my eyes specifically, it is horse shit to call it a retina display. It is ignorant marketbabble that lowers us all.
It’s a petty good approximate term that to my mind works perfectly well. Sure, things change depending on view distance but I guess nerds have to survive a term that’s not always exact. The horror!
That was an uninformed rant on your part. What are you suggesting as an alternative? High-PPI certainly does not work.
Do you actually believe that the magical "retina" mark just coincidentally happened to be 2x Apple's original resolutions? How convenient!
It’s a petty good approximate term
It's a marketing term that the stupid embrace. Is a 64Kbps mp3 "eardrum audio" in a standard room with a fan? Is 128Kbps eardrum audio on a crummy mp3 player?
That was an uninformed rant on your part
What was uninformed about it? Desperately curious to hear what.