Web designers: you need a Retina MacBook Pro | Hacker News Reader

Web designers: you need a Retina MacBook Pro

marco.org

22 pointswyclif27 comments

I’ve been using a Retina MacBook Pro for one week, only as a secondary computer,2 and I’ve already changed my font, redesigned my narrow layout’s header, and conditionally replaced an image with text. I’ve noticed that fonts, especially, respond extremely differently on the Retina screen: many of my old, non-Retina choices simply didn’t look good, and many fonts and metrics that were previously poor for screen use can be used nicely on Retina screens.

So you swapped out your old fonts that look good for 99% of people for fancy new ones that, while "poor for screen use" for those 99%, look nice on Retina screens?

> Windows-using web designers, if such people still exist: I’m sure there’s something you can do to enable high-DPI mode on Windows

Is the snark really necessary here? Why so mean?

> Is the snark really necessary here? Why so mean?

Marco has long shown a visceral disdain for non-Apple products and those who use them. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior is on the rise in general, and not many people are willing to call out those who find it necessary to take a potshot at the "other camp" every chance they get.

As for Marco's comment about Windows-using web devs, one of the most respected members of our community and a serial web entrepreneur, patio11, appears to be a Windows user, at least as of 6 months ago: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3422608

The comment was about web designers not developers. Patrick is well respected round these parts for good reason, but it is certainly not for his design skills.

I didn't read it as being particularly harsh or snarky. It seems Web designers using Windows are becoming a rare breed. At least from what I can tell anyway. FWIW, I am not a designer and run Mac/Windows for testing purposes only.

You don't tend to see this type of behavior from long-time Mac users. It, interestingly enough, tends to come mostly from people who were Windows users and then jumped on the OS X bandwagon at some point in the last 10 years.

It's easier to forget the dark ages of a company if you didn't use their products while they were struggling. Nobody's perfect over a long enough time frame.

What’s mean about that statement? You don’t have to read it like that. Always take the generous interpretation.

This is just silly. Are there legions of websites that work on non-Retina computers that actually break on the Retina MacBook Pro (rather than just looking bad)?

Web designers should not default to the latest-and-greatest. When they do, they often produce sites that are completely unusable without it. Web designers should spend more time worrying about users that don't have the latest-and-greatest (aka most users).

Most web designers need old laptops and low-end smartphones far, far more than they need a Retina MacBook Pro.

Certainly not legions but it is worthwhile to step into an Apple store and give your sites a try. I was surprised to find my canvas-based code breaking on the Retina MacBook Pro.

FWIW, the cause was getImageData(0, 0, w, h) returning 4wh pixels and not w*h as I naively expected.

This article is ridiculous. The author essentially suggests that we pander to his demographic (see footnote 1, "Windows-using web designers, if such people still exist") for a non-existent reason, namely, that "you may not realize quite how bad it looks when any graphical assets show at 1X.". This is the type of irresponsible FUD that I would not expect to find here. Show me a website that looks worse on a Retina display, and I'll show you a crappy rendering system.

But retina display is the future. (At least I hope so.)

It may be, but no website I've looked at on the iPad 2 looks better or worse than it already looks like on a non-retina desktop/laptop.

EDIT: Gah, I meant the iPad 3. Slip of the finger or slip of the mind, make of it what you will.

Clearly this is the truth. Except (and I'm being quite serious here) to those who just dropped a big chunk of self image into their new toy. There's a huge psychological investment to a product like this. It's better! And anything that prevents it from being/seeming/acting better is an abomination. Marco Arment is deeply, personally offended that site designers aren't improving their work so that it looks better on his personal screen, because that situation reduces the value of the thing he so admires.

The iPad 2 does not have a retina display.

Indeed. The iPad 3 is here for what? 6 months now? And still websites that use lots of images don't look nice but again, so what?

I think the iPad 3 numbers and now retina MBP are so small that the extra work and bandwidth are not worth the trouble. Not now and not in the next couple of years IMHO.

Who will drive this change? Windows computers I think since there numbers are way more than Mac computers, even if Apple tells you otherwise.

Just my 2¢.

> No respectable developer would ever ship an app that wasn’t extensively tested on real devices.

I find this offensive. You are knowingly mixing facts up to support your argument.

Testing on a real device is entirely different thing than testing on a real device with Retina.

Your whole article is about testing on Retina devices, and suddenly an argument about something completely different. (Testing on real devices.)

What's up, do you think your readers are stupid?

Ok, so the truth is raising the hackles of HN. Cool. Examine why you're upset, is he wrong or is it because he's right but he's talking about the other team/company that you don't like?

He is right to say that web designers need to start designing for high-dpi displays because high-dpi is going to be or already is the norm. Look at phones, they have what 150-200+ dpi? Tablets? Yep, high-dpi there too.

Windows? Well, actually yes. Windows 8 was designed to support high-dpi as well. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-dif...

Perhaps the article would be better worded to say that web designers should buy Retna MBP because high-dpi is the future and Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android are all going to have high-dpi screens inside of a year or two, so it's going to take off pretty fast, and the Retna MBP is the best/only mainstream high-dpi workstation you can buy right now.

Of course, that would be rational and nuanced and those things don't get you clicks, links, or pageviews because after all this is the internet.

Windows has been scaling to various DPIs for ages (sometimes to undesired out-of-the-box resulsts, such when, a few years ago, I plugged in an XP desktop to an HDTV over HDMI and it tried to make the fonts display at the same physical size as on a monitor despite me sitting much further away). It's something it (and Linux, and Android) has ahead on the curve of compared to Apple—from an engineer's perspective, just going with doubling is a rather inelegant solution.

XP wasn't very good at it when it came to third-party apps, but on Vista or 7 (I forget which I was on back then now) once I got the DPI slider in the right place for that TV, it provided a quite enjoyable experience, even on older or non-standard apps.

It is important but not urgent (sorta depends on your site demographics). I'm not dropping a couple grand for a 1st run, rushed to market laptop. I can test now using the other methods he mentioned and I'll get a retina laptop when they are more reasonably priced, the hardware is more refined, and when most software is updated to look right.

There are a number reasons to adopt retina graphics for your website today but it's not for everyone.

Consider the time it takes to update and maintain 2 versions of all images and ask yourself, is the >1% user base going to outweigh the time it takes to update this?

Make sure you consider the possibility that the >1% who are early adopters of the retina macbook may also be the type of early adopters who would try your alpha version.

As a designer, I know it's a major problem that if you primarily work on the best/brightest displays, you forget what your designs look like everywhere else.

So if you decide to "go retina", make sure you don't get carried away with fine lines and make the <99% squint to see your 8px #f0f0f0 text.

Between the Mac, Cinema Display, iPad, iPhone/Touch and now a Retina Display/Mac -- being a web designer is pretty hard on the wallet these days me thinks.

And that's just Apple.

Perhaps akin to my thought: 'So, I need to spend $2500 on another laptop because I have no source for an equivalently featured monitor that I can plug in to what I have.'

Monopolies... [de facto, if nothing else]

Apple had a WWDC 2012 session on optimizing web sites for high DPI displays. Interesting but not terribly complex stuff. I think if you follow the best practices they outline you can feel pretty confident your site will look good on a high DPI display. If you have a high enough resolution display you could always switch to high DPI for testing.

If the thing would ship. I ordered this thing weeks ago, and the Apple store ever since then has said "ships in 3-4 weeks." Every week I go to check on my order for the retina MBP and it says this.

They either really dropped the ball on manufacturing this laptop or it's the best selling Mac ever, because they just cannot ship any.

I'm really excited for the high DPI Web. Higher resolution should be the last piece of the puzzle needed to finally kill the (terrible) practice of using images or Flash or (gulp) Silverlight to display text. Finally text can be beautiful to graphic designers, but still be text to developers and software.

There is probably a simple explanation, but I'm stuck wondering why a pixel-doubled image looks worse than that same image at native resolution on a lower resolution screen? Why doesn't "combining" four pixels into one make it look the same?

I bought one as my primary work machine for developing iPhone, iPad and Android apps and I can recommend it to any developer of all sorts. This is just a really nice developer machine, I love coding on that thing.

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