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Comment by dendory | Hacker News Reader

No. My screen is 1440x900 and it's honestly as big as I want it to go. See, what usually happens is that when you increase resolution, everything becomes smaller. Desktop icons, text in apps, web sites. Yes you can manually resize everything but it's a pain and it doesn't always work right. Web pages get deformed since you're only changing the fonts. And it's not like I'm ever watching movies in higher resolution than HD. So I'll keep my 'low' resolution screens.

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My screen has 2880x1880 and the fonts are as big as they used to be on my old 1680x1050 (or your 1440x900 screen).

It's just much more comfortable to read on it and pictures look amazing.

If you really wanted to you could make everything tiny, but you don't need to.

And finally, head over to an apple store and take a look at their retina macbook pro and try comparing it to a normal macbook pro.

What really needs to happen is for desktops to become resolution independent so that you can set the size of the elements based upon your preference and not some fixed pixel grid.

It is very difficult to design UIs in the desktop style that can stand up to DPI changes like that and not end up with text rendering problems or pixel cracks between elements.

That's why OS X only supports 1x and 2x HiDPI; everything else just resizes the whole screen.

Did you even read as far as the "atomic wedgie" part?

Your operating system might not be able to handle more resolution, but the OS that comes with pretty much any new computer (Windows 8 or Mountain Lion) is going to be handle it fine, so there's no reason not to have higher DPI on new laptops.

Couldn't you just lower the setting?

Laptop screens typically look fairly bad when at anything other than their "native" resolution. A bit less flexible than ye olde CRTs in that respect.

Though this is much less the case with high res screens, Apple's retina laptops for example are usabe at different resolutions.

The difference is how the signal is sent. When you change the resolution in XP for instance, a low res picture gets sent to the display which then has to up sample it, and it looks sucky. On the new MBP the picture sent is always the native resolution of the monitor, you just change the size of the UI elements according to your preference.

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