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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty awesome, and a pretty grim testament to the lameness of Laptop makers if they aren't willing to put that panel in a laptop! (I mean seriously, you can't pull the display port connection out of an ivy bridge chipset?

Something I have always felt there would be a good market for would be a compact an inexpensive LVDS (TFT-LCD connector) to some sort of driver (small FPGA or maybe SOC). You could then salvage displays from "dead" laptops (where the display works) and build up some pretty awesome sorts of deca-panel UIs :-) I'm thinking 'home star trek bridge' to a whole new level.

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Of course you can pull the DP connections out, that's not the problem. The problem is that when you put that display on a windows machine, you end up with a bunch of legacy windows software and web graphics content that looks unreadably small, followed unhappy users who return those fancy DP panels to your retailers.

Of course, the same thing is true of iOS and OS X software, which is precisely the reason "Retina" (as distinguished from arbitrary 200+ DPI hardware) displays are always shipped in resolutions that exactly double those of pre-existing devices. So even though the legacy software doesn't handle it Apple, by controlling the framework, is able to make it work more or less seamlessly.

Dell and HP don't have that freedom, they need help from Microsoft, and Microsoft, well... At least Windows 8 does high DPI natively, though the MS decision was basically to jettison legacy visuals and hope no one runs the old software anymore.

>Apple, by controlling the framework, is able to make it work more or less seamlessly.

This is more or less the crux of everything there is to love or hate about Apple.

I have computers in datacenters that I can effortlessly SSH into when I am feeling the (frequent and chronic) urge to Dick About With Computers And/Or Software.

However, the one that connects to my display(s) is simply a tool for running Chrome, Skype, FaceTime, Mail.app, TweetDeck, Spotify, and SSH, and, as such, should not ever break or otherwise hinder the incredibly simple tasks which ARE ITS ONLY JOB.

This is why the only computers I own that I touch on a regular basis all have fruit on the back. It's a very simple calculus.

<-- Down votes go here and by all means, please don't respond.

Interesting. My personal workstation runs Windows and I too effortlessly SSH and RDP into many headless or virtual machines to dick around and (occasionally) to do actual work. Hey, I also run Chrome, Skype, TweetDeck, Spotify, SSH and the like and I have been for years...on the same install of Windows. It's like your calculus doesn't work at all in my universe.

Actually...I don't think you're doing calculus at all.

Also, have you ever seen the source of Chrome? It's not that simple. Lay-people think it's simple, but software developers know better.

I laughed at the "incredibly simple" bit myself. I'm sure it must seem that way to people who live at the top of the stack doing javascript hackery and MongoDB maintenance. It's amusing how few people, even in this world of open source everywhere, have ever bothered to do something as simple (in an only-slightly-ironic sense of "simple") as build an OS distribution. Android might be the "simplest" of this kind of thing, and it's still a 10G+ tree.

I would have accepted "it's Unix". I think that's got to be the biggest reason techies run Macs.

kill -9 Word

Need I say more? :-)

no, because it's probably just an alias to less

"A browser" is simple from a "a process that talks to the network and draws things on screen" standpoint. I'm not suggesting that Chrome isn't a complex application - just that it's self-contained and very well tested and doesn't do anything special with the OS or hardware (drivers, USB, video modes, etc).

My workflow would work on Windows, too, aside from the fact that it'd suck. (Example: Unplug an external USB audio interface while a song is playing. OSX skips a beat and then plays via internal speakers, at the previous internal-speaker-volume-level.)

I could travel with luggage that isn't Pelican/Incase, too— but I don't.

The same reasons [0] are why I have a Chromebook. CrOS is limited, sure, but the limits make the thing bloody near invincible (and amazingly productive).

[0] Hangouts are luckily the VoIP of choice for most I work with

I was thinking of buying one for exactly this reason, too.

The fruit-calculus? :-)

Think about what your laptop is doing that we would have had no hope of doing with desktop Linux just a few years ago (if ever, depending on the hardware).

Sharing access to video capture and audio hardware between software written (sort of) by Apple, Microsoft (Skype, so -ish), Spotify, etc. would have been unthinkable. You would have been restarting your primary machine if you made the mistake of starting any two apps that tried to grab your QuickCam at the same time.

I had a Thinkpad with a 15.4-inch 1920x1200 screen, back when such wonders existed, and I had no big problems with its 150 DPI running Windows XP, even less with Windows 7. Yes, there were some really old applications that wouldn't react to system-wide DPI settings, but that was a small minority.

I think there is simply no excuse for the regression in laptop resolutions - I can't even find a laptop that will give me 1200 lines anymore, they give me "full HD" at best, which is less. And we can see proof in all the comments saying that they would buy this guy's hack to plug a hi-res screen into a laptop.

The Chromebook pixel has a 12.85", 2560 × 1700 resolution, which is 3:2.

Sadly Lenovo appear to want to destroy the Think brand, and they're really the only other laptop that would have used a similar display.

Exotic features like swivelling a display to be portrait rather than landscape add a lot of cost to the product, and are rare.

I had a Compaq in 2004 with the same display. And indeed, windows works pretty well up to about 150-170 DPI. But I have a 10" Acer tablet with a 1920x1080 screen sitting next to me, and the legacy windows desktop is basically unusable. Yes, it can be made to work if you are tolerant of VERY SMALL BUTTONS, largely unreadable text in graphics assets, and know where to find all the font settings. But it pretty much sucks, and no one sane would try to use it that way.

Microsoft's Surface Pro has a 10" 1920x1080 IPS LCD panel (208 DPI), running on Ivy Bridge. There's no reason anyone else couldn't do the same.

Edit: Guess what Toshiba just announced? 2560x1440 touchscreen panel in an ultrabook: http://us.toshiba.com/kira

it's not the only the DPI, it's also the aspect ratio... 16:9 sucks for everything except watching movies.

Like people mention above, the hardware isn't the only impediment; Apple's control is what helps them a lot with this. Desktop Windows' support for DPI scaling is anemic at best, and this is only partially fixed in Windows 8 by having ad-hoc dimensions per-device, or on PCs just "big" vs. "really big" mode.

The problem are legacy apps. The Surface Pro is at 1.6X, so things begin to look small unless the app can be upscaled either by expanding the pixels (in which case, 1.6x is extremely inconvenient as not being a power of 2) or have the resolution natively baked into the app (not many yet).

2X (as in the Toshiba) is much easier to upscale transparently (2x being a power of 2), but its not really valuable until apps start supporting that resolution natively.

Edit: as pointed out below, N just has to be an integer, not a power of 2.

Magnification factors don't have to be a power of two to work well, they just have to be integers. 3x scaling doesn't introduce any aliasing.

Edit: yes you are right.

I was more concerned with 1.6, 1.8, 1.4. Definitely, as long as N is an integer, scaling will work correctly.

I've got a Surface Pro and I actually run the Win32/Desktop release of Chrome without scaling.

What legacy app do you think won't work well? I'll be glad to try it out. Everything I've thrown at it so far has worked great. Even the desktop apps work well with touch or the pen.

Visual Studio :)

Visual Studio (2012) is one of the first things I installed and it works great.

Some other desktop apps I have installed: VLC Media Player, Notepad++ and Balsamiq Mockups. All work well but you are forced to use the pen (or type cover/touchpad) at times to grab little drag handles (if you're trying just to use touch).

Does Visual Studio upscale automatically according to your DPI setting or do you have to fiddle with the font settings? Also, is it possible to increase the font size for the menu fonts?

I'm genuinely curious.

I didn't change any settings in Visual Studio after installing on my Surface Pro and everything looks fine to me. I'm embarrassed to admit that I really haven't peeked into what's going on with the DPI settings (because how it came out of the box has been perfectly fine for 99% of what I've been running on it), but I believe it's set at 150% DPI and VS respects that throughout.

Nice! I've been wanting to know if Visual studio was resolution independent or not. Being implemented in WPF, this was always a possibility, but I could find no evidence on the web.

> Something I have always felt there would be a good market for would be a compact an inexpensive LVDS (TFT-LCD connector) to some sort of driver (small FPGA or maybe SOC).

search ebay for "lvds dvi" (without quotes), you'll find inexpensive LVDS drivers. For about 30 bucks you get DVI in, LVDS out.

Unfortunately the problem with my collection of dead laptops is that the majority of them have dead screens.

For me these become servers :-) Built in UPS for the win!

I wonder how my co-lo would react to me attempting to rack a pile of elderly laptops with display deficiencies :) I'm going to have to try this now...

I put a macbook in a $39 supermicro 1u case and took it to a colo so I wouldn't have to buy an xserve to run one cheesy little osx app. It worked great.

The more features which are added to a laptop, the more it tends to cost.

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