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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious. Pro tip: not all your users are graphic designers. It may be the case that the author, and everyone he knows, has new "retina" products from Apple. That's wonderful. But it can't be taken to represent a broader userbase.

It seems to me that the web's mainstream properties are built for workers in large corporations to fiddle with when they should be working. Most of these people have 1280x1024, 96 DPI screens attached to Windows XP or Windows 7 PCs.

I expect that to be the case for some years to come.

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Speak again in 3 years.

Today, I am a geek (not really a designer) and 2 out of 3 of my devices have retina displays already (iPhone and iPad). Within much less than 3 years, all my devices will. Within 3 years, there will be no Apple device being sold that doesn't have a Retina display. Will other vendors follow suit? If they don't, they'll be left in the dust, so I imagine they will have to, if they can.

It's usually a good idea to skate where the puck is going, rather than where it is now. In 3 years, the puck will be retina. My Macbook Air is not Retina, so I can't be arsed to design for Retina... yet. Once my Mac has a Retina display, I will design for Retina, and let the lower-res experience be inferior. By then, most of the people who care about such things will have Retina displays anyway.

Will other vendors follow suit? If they don't, they'll be left in the dust, so I imagine they will have to, if they can.

Said the designer. People were still buying SD TVs years after HD ones came out. I don't disagree that it is good to skate where the puck is going, but it's still too early to worry about it now. A lot of the web design we do right now won't even still be used in three years time.

Once my Mac has a Retina display, I will design for Retina, and let the lower-res experience be inferior.

Terrible, terrible idea. It was only a few days ago that someone posted how ignoring Windows cost them dearly. Don't ever design for the machine you're using, design for your customer. This applies to screen resolution, processing power, everything.

Legacy Windows APIs don't support scalable interfaces. Do you think the Fortune 500 and Global 1000 will phase out every legacy 32 bit application and replace every 1280x1024 display between now and 2015 ?

I don't.

P.S. Does Windows even have a pixel doubler for legacy apps on "retina"-type displays?

Just so you know, a whole bunch of laptops have been coming with "retina" displays for years now.

They'd call it a "Full HD" laptop so it doesn't sound as shiny, but it's still a 15 or 17 inch screen with a 1920x1080 resolution.

Indeed, my last 2 dell laptops were 1920x1200 with 15" screens.

But people haven't been running those in 2x mode, so they don't require special design.

> Just so you know, a whole bunch of laptops have been coming with "retina" displays for years now. They'd call it a "Full HD" laptop so it doesn't sound as shiny, but it's still a 15 or 17 inch screen with a 1920x1080 resolution.

That is different, though. 1080p on a 15" display is 146PPI; a "Retina" display (2880x1800) is 226PPI. That's a significant difference.

To put it into better perspective, put the resolutions into google:

(1920 * 1080) / (2880 * 1800) = 0.4

Your 1080p 15" display contains just 40% of the pixels of a single Retina 15" display. They even showed this in the demo. They edited a 1080p video in Final Cut at full resolution and there was plenty of room left for UI elements.

Apple is definitely the first to put a display of this density into a consumer product, or maybe any product.

No, definitely not. IBM sold a 22" 3840x2400 (205ppi) LCD monitor over a decade ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Panasonic has also launched a 20" 3840x2160 IPS LCD display, too.

1280x1024? Do you have any data for that? 1366x768 would strike me as the much more likely resolution. The "normal" users I know are split into two groups - those with newish cheap 15" laptops, which are all 1366x768, or those with ancient desktops at 1024x768, or worse, 800x600 because they stumbled on the resolution setting and used it as a way to make things bigger.

Don't say this is the user's fault though. People with weak eyesight NEED to get stuff bigger and because of tons legacy software even Windows 7 can't really help you with scaling. Scaling the resolution is still the only really viable option for these people.

In fact, Apple's way of scaling by internally doubling the resolution on retina displays is the most useful way of scaling I've seen so far. It gives you an -almost- crisp image for 3 different scaled settings and one perfectly crisp image for the retina resolution.

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