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Comment by MrScruff | Hacker News Reader

Apple did have a solution in place for several releases that supported arbitrary scaling. It could be enabled via a developer tool. I'm guessing the 2x solution came about once they realised getting all of their developers to rewrite for arbitrary scaling was impractical.

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I think it was much more urgent than that. They wanted to ship actual retina displays on actual Macs on a defined product cycle. They had a hard date by which this HAD to work. Getting developers to rewrite eventually is one thing, getting them to rewrite in time for the release of a specific product in 12 months time is another.

If Sony is planning to release a HiDPI Windows laptop, whether it works well is a problem for who? Sony? Microsoft? Every Windows app developer ever?

If Apple releases a laptop with a Retina display, it's Apple's problem. No ifs or buts. Everyone knows exactly where the buck stops.

I think Apple also realised that the 2x solution is all they will need. There is very little point going higher density than the current 15" rMBP display. So there is little point in supporting completely arbitrary resolutions — Apple are betting on this density as the standard for the future.

I think they also realise that our current "2x" solution is our future software's "1x" scale factor. When Apple's line of hardware is retina-only, we'll probably see them drop support for the distinction between 1x and 2x. Everything will simply become designed for the current density.

I think it'll stick around for a long time, due to external displays: projectors, TVs, etc... which either don't benefit a great deal or won't be upgraded to hiDPI for a long time.

I posted a separate comment to the effect that the Apple solution also allows using both hi- and regular-DPI displays simultaneously with no issues.

Given the push to 4K on TVs and other video viewing devices, it seems like they'll catch up fast enough. 4K at the typical viewing distances is pretty close to retina in terms of the number of degrees of your vision each pixel covers.

To me this was the key insight. There was this idea of a slowly, ever-increasing display density that we'd have to handle by making everything be vector based, since bitmaps don't scale -- which has a grain of truth, and a certain aesthetic beauty.

But in practice, the human eye has limits so density is not going to increase forever, and we only have a known, finite set of displays to support. So just provide bitmaps for the display densities that matter. Boom. Problem solved.

(Probably forever, depending on how much you believe the "retina" marketing claim -- the difference between the type on e.g. a retina display mac and a magazine seems small enough to me that I could easily imagine a push to "super-retina" not happening in my lifetime.)

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