MacBook Pro Retina Display Analysis
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
If you have Xcode and Quartz Debug you can enable HiDPI on any external monitor and try it out.
It'll be a little laggy, though, which probably won't be the case with a non-WiFi connection.
Many of my colleagues agree. Slower cpu with 512GB at ~$2500 would be just about perfect.
Though it's possible Apple figured that if they offered such option on the 'lower' model, most people wouldn't bother with the highest end because the processor bump is marginal.
I think it's also about using components that give you the largest gross margin - A slightly outdated model of a component will always be cheaper and more readily available than the cutting edge model - which further carries the risk of being less broadly tested.
An in-between step is often to offer that option (like a larger SSD), but at significant additional cost. Particularly with things like RAM, apple sometimes charges you more than twice the regular market price: Getting a Mac Pro, for instance, you pay ~1k € extra when jumping from 6GB RAM to 32GB. Buying 32GB of RAM (yes, ECC and everything), sets you back 400€.
Their SSD prices have gotten slightly more reasonable lately (buying the regular HDD option, selling that drive and buying your own SSD often saved you hundreds), although they're still a good bit off - especially considering that Apple buys OEM from Toshiba and in bulk.
My personal conclusion is always to buy the bare minimum configuration and upgrade myself - I purchased a Macbook Pro 17" at the smallest configuration and added an SSD and an extra regular 1TB drive. Will probably add some RAM later this year. Had I gotten all that at Apple right away, I would probably have to pay 50% extra (although they don't even offer the option of exchanging the DVD Drive with an HDD).
Scroll down and mouse over the image of the bottom of the MacBook Pro with Retina display. Notice that the RAM is soldered on, the SSD however is not.
My PC loving mates are going to tear the ass outta me on this...
While the upgrade to Mountain Lion will be free, I have a funny feeling that Adobe will charge (or at least will try) you some extra money for an updated version of Photoshop for Retina Display MacBook Pro :).
Any self respecting company or individual developer will probably provide a free upgrade for the UI of their applications soon in order to support the new resolution.
You won't pay anything more. Pro Apple apps just got a free update to Retina-enabled, regular apps will get updated with Mountain Lion, and third party apps will also be updated for free.
I don't think you understand what this high-DPI thing is meant to be and how it is supposed to work. Giving you the real pixels is not an option, because every asset of every app would have to be updated or look tiny and be unusable.
It doesn't even make sense what you propose, because retina screens are meant to give extra detail for same sized elements, not merely extra pixels -- nobody needs 5MP in a 15", whereas the extra detail is easily appreciated.
There's no guarantee that 3rd party developers will provide a free update. They could release Foo HD alongside their Foo app and make you buy it again.
I wonder if the free upgrade will be the App Store version that allows you to install it on all authorized versions. If so, this could be an advantage to buying after the Mountain Lion release, since Macs that come with newer OSes generally don't allow you to upgrade your other Macs to the new OS.
This results in both blur (ngligible with a high enough resolution, but doesn't seem to be the case here, seeing the Safari vs Chrome comparison) and a performance hit.
See the Safari/Chrome comparison in the article to see what this means in real terms...
Given the 'free' GPU we get with machines these days (and by free I mean its always included) it seems reasonable to use its oversampling anti-aliasing feature for desktop display. I'm not sure why you wouldn't do that unless it was some sort of power issue.
In a way, when referring to monitors, the word 'resolution' is in itself a misnomer, as we're not actually talking about density but instead about absolute pixel measurements.
That's exactly what this is, though — the window decorations, for example, in OS X on the new MBP are identical in size to the ones on the "old" MBP, they're just more detailed.
And since they're so detailed (hence "retina display" moniker) that most people won't be able to see any pixels at all and, since in just a few years, all displays will obviously be "retina displays", I think there's a strong argument to be made that resolution-independent interfaces aren't ever gonna happen and that that's not a bad thing at all. (They've been tried for years and they always end up a burden for the developer and/or not working well for the user.) The limitations of human biology make it so that this simple "hack" is actually the easiest for developers, works the best for users, and won't ever need to be replaced. … OK, yeah, one day we'll all have bionic eyes and we'll have to do the same doubling trick again, but presumably "Bionic-Retina Displays" will be cheap to produce by then. :)
While I agree screen densities won't increase anytime soon, it's still an unsolved problem.
IIRC, NeXT did solve it, as did Sun's NeWS.
Maybe one day...?
According to Wikipedia, Microsoft's 96 is apparently based on screen text being viewed from a different distance than printed text, so they use 96 ppi to account for the difference, which also gave them more a few more pixels with which to draw characters. Apple had to draw a 10 point character 10 pixels high, but Microsoft could draw a 10 point character 13 pixels high, giving them more to work with.
This would be true if the displays were also 72 dpi, which they are not. DPI in Windows can be set manually. Mine is set to 84, based on the handy on-screen ruler in the settings page. If I view a document in Word's print preview at 100% zoom, and stick a printed page on my display (via static electricity, try it) next to it, they match exactly. Very handy for printing over a page with existing content (paper with preprinted corporate borders, headers).
Nowadays, of course, it's a free-for-all.
"built-in display was a one-bit black-and-white, 9 in (23 cm) CRT with a resolution of 512×342 pixels, establishing the desktop publishing standard of 72 PPI"
ImageWriter prints were 144dpi, and you could verify thtat the system was WYSIWIG by holding a print in front of the screen. Also, Mac OS graphics used 1/72" pixels for years (with various hacks added soon in order to support the LaserWriter's 300 dpi)
Windows (initially?) had separate notions of device pixels and logical pixels (dialog units?) that allowed for some resolution independence. Its most obvious disadvantage was that it was not simple (neigh impossible?) to know whether two parallel lines you drew looked equally wide.
Does Windows use the EDID-reported DPI at all?
Lest I be considered a nay-sayer, I'm going to be getting an MBP largely for the resolution boost.
Let's analyze this for a second.
The resolution by the OS is ostensibly 1920x1200. This is what apps see and what they render bitmaps for.
This is then upscaled twice in each direction to 3840x2400.
Then, this finally somehow gets put on 2880x1800. As I understand it, it gets downscaled from 3840x2400 directly to 2880x1800.
LOL, it just dawned on me. You guys have been taken for such a fucking ride. I've just checked the numbers, I hadn't noticed it before.
The physical resolution of the monitor is 2880x1800. This is exactly 1.5x more in each direction than 1920x1200, which is the original input format.
Now you must understand two things: 1. scaling is a DSP process. 2. You never use floating point operations in digital signal processing if you can get away with integers, because integer operations are so much cheaper and because the result is always more precise. (The only reason to use floats is to get more headroom, but that's a detail you don't need to worry with because it is in no way applicable to resolution scaling. You could use floats for pixel colour, and many systems do that already)
So what does this mean? How do you multiply by 1.5 if you can only use integers?
--> YOU MULTIPLY BY THREE AND DIVIDE BY TWO. <--
The intermediate resolution of 3840x2400 exists solely as a tiny step in the rescaling algorithm, a step which in itself does not add any information that wasn't there in the original 1920x1200 image. Similarly, some of you audio people may realize that most of your VST or AU plugins have 64x oversampling. Does this mean that your project is working at 12 MHz sampling rate? NO!!! Your recorded material is still at 192k, and your project still does not contain any useful information above 96 kHz. Don't be silly. There's being tricked when not knowing, but given that a majority of the people commenting on mac hardware here seem to have some idea of audio processing, that's just fundamentalist hypocrisy.
You've fallen prey to sensationalist marketing and measurement of e-penis. Except your e-penis is completely made up and never actually happened.
Wow, some people in this thread are so, extremely, gullible. I had really come to expect more from HN, and am truly disappointed and dismayed.
The thing you're missing is that this step does add information. OS X will render retina graphics for the UI instead of the traditional graphics, then those higher-resolution graphics are downsized. So, instead of an 18x18 icon, it will use a more detailed 36x36 icon, then downscale that. In the case of apps that haven't been updated for retina displays you are correct — certain assets will be upscaled. But the operating system and many core apps are ready for retina display.
Nobody is saying it's a perfect solution, but it's much better than just upscaling. The point is that at these densities downscaling can look pretty good — supposedly better than the native resolutions emulated by the downscaling.
On Nvidia GPUs (the GPU in the machine), integer ops are second class citizens. The GPU architecture is optimized for floating point operations, and they do it extremely well. Using integers instead of floating point is not very advantageous. AMD GPUs are a different story however.
If you're looking for a practical application of this, watch a YouTube video fullscreen that has 720p and 1080p options on a display that's 1680x1050 or anything in between the two video sizes. The 1080p version is better looking because it's scaled down, not up.
This is the concept behind running a 3820x2400 framebuffer and downscaling it to 2880x1800 for display - you're getting a crisper image because of the use of 2x drawing by the system for text and standard UI elements. Of course, third-party bitmaps aren't going to benefit from this until they're updated, but Apple developers have been through this before with retina displays on iOS devices.
In other words, it depends but it most certainly will have its share of issues, question is for how long.
I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome. I'm just saying it might not be wise to generalize from Chrome's appearance to retina-naive 3rd party apps in general.
As part of its security model, Chrome does something akin to rendering everything offscreen in an unprivileged process then passing that to the user-facing process.
I'm curious of Apple and Adobe have worked together to allow image documents to display at true resolution, within a scaled output?
Does that make sense? I suppose what I'm saying is, working at a 100% canvas at 100% zoom level (instead of say, a 50% scale level) while all system elements are scaled.
EDIT: This might not even matter, from a practical perspective.
[edit] reading through the article, it seems that they've either gone and broken the word 'resolution', or Anand is very confused.
At 1440 x 900 you don't get any increase in desktop resolution compared to a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro, but everything is ridiculously crisp.
I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.
I've yet to see any platform where this is the case.
It can if you set the global resolution to 2880x1800, but because most UI elements are likely bitmapped it'll be unusable: a 30px button will remain 30px, but will be a quarter the physical surface.
According to the article, you can only set a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1200 within the UI and it resamples that up.
As a GUI, it renders as it always did in Retina resolution, i.e it is not shows it's buttons and labels any more detailed, or any smaller. This is how every non-Retina ready app behaves.
That doesn't affect how big an image it can edit at all.
So, what "horror and dismay"?
Because bitmap-based applications (which is all of them) designed for 110 DPI are unusable at 220 dpi, you can barely click the buttons.
> I hope they are not rescaling stuff like photoshop to something other than actual screen res
From the keynote, I would guess they are unless the application "opts in" to HiDPI support, as with iOS. HiDPI applications would be rendered in "true resolution" (2880x1800), non-HiDPI ones are automatically scaled to the specified global setting (for non-native controls, native controls probably use native rendering in all cases)
> I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.
It scales bitmaps, but text is rendered at native resolution (or so I'd guess), so the text and "native" UI elements are going to be extremely crisp, because they'll be rendered with 4 times the usual amounts of pixels for the same physical size.