Before buying this, you need to wait until a professional with a colorimeter and a lagmeter evaluates this monitor if you remotely care about color accuracy or gaming. Resolution isn't the only consideration when buying a new monitor.
Lots of hackers only care about having enough pixels to legibly represent characters in their tiny coding font.
Sure it is! Reading on a monitor is pure torture ever since I bought a Retina MBP. If this is anywhere close to being affordable (realistically: no) I'd buy it for that reason alone.
> Sure it is!
So you'd be fine with a 3840x2160 monitor that has a 5Hz refresh rate? Or one with a 500ms lag time? Or one that only displayed in grayscale, or in 8-bit color?
Resolution is perhaps the most important consideration, but by no means the only one.
As it runs at 1920x2400@25 Hz you can't really watch a movie on the screen because in the middle of the screen where the two halves meet you have a weird effect of any movie due to, I guess, low frame rate and not completely sync'd outputs. I guess you could confine it to one half of the monitor but gosh, are you going to watch your movies in 11" ?
If the monitor will allow for 3840x2400@30Hz on DisplayPort 1.1 (which most people have -- 1.2 is rare, Intel got it in Haswell, and I think nVidia got to 1.2 maybe late 2011) that may be enough for coding and watching movies. Forget games. Time will tell. I will try when the monitor has a three figures price tag.
Also, 4K displays achieving 60Hz over DisplayPort 1.2 are http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.php/reviews/hardware/vgaca... using the same tiling dual display (at least currently), with each tile being 1920x2160@60Hz and producing weird effects as thearticle shows.
Also, it will be fun and games when, unlike with DVI where figuring out whether you had SL or DL was relatively easy you will now need to figure out whether you have DisplayLink 1.1 or 2.0 with zero difference on the connector.
Compared with my old CCFL-backlit desktop LCD, the Retina Display's backlight is far less uniform, and whites have a more readily perceptible color shift across the screen. It's not enough to qualify for a replacement (trust me, I tried), but it's nonetheless distracting enough to make me want to do most of my design work on my standard-DPI monitor.
If you aren't aware, you can tease out the LCD manufacturer via the model string and this command:
ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r
and whites have a more readily perceptible color shift across the screen
Is yours dysfunctional? Retina screen has honestly been a godsend.
The line details on UIs are too thin so contrast disappears and the text verticals are too thin so it hinders readability for me. iOS 7 admittedly doesn't help that but it's not for me.
Oh and according to my optician I have better than average sight.
In this new high-res world, virtually all desktop monitors are just broken. Ugh, I am typing these very words right now on a 30" Dell 3008FWP, and I want to gouge out my eyes...