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Comment by FollowSteph3 | Hacker News Reader

The other thing to remember is that most likely less than 1-2% of your whole customer base is currently using high DPI monitors, so all these very high and very real costs are sometimes not possible in ROI, especially for more niche markets. It much like supporting IE6, or maybe IE5 for the 1% that still use it? Would you in a niche market compared to a mainstream app? This will change with time as these monitors become more common but right now the threshold is still very low compared to the costs.

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That seems like a lowball estimate even today. If you go shopping for a new Windows computer or tablet in Best Buy or Staples or some other american store, maybe 1/3rd to 1/2 of what's on shelves is high DPI now, from the $400 tablets up to $1200 ultrabooks. Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, HP, all the big manufacturers have 2560x1440 or 3200x1800 ultrabooks and hybrids out, and even 1920x1080 tablets are set to 1.5x or 2x DPI scaling because those pixels are packed into 10" or smaller screens.

Tablets yes. Notebooks no. 'Ultrabooks', whatever they are, maybe. The majority of laptops up to 15" and ~$1200 are still 1366x768. Source: I recently went shopping for a laptop with roughly that budget. In fact, I don't think you can buy anything 15" beyond 1080p on that budget.

1-2% is a bit low.

I actually tested this several months ago for one my projects and it was about 5% (on a sample of few hundreds). That's a very respectable 1 in 20. Not that I disagree with your ROI point, it's just that playing well with non-default DPIs becomes progressively more important now.

But was your project more oriented towards a tech audience or the general population. Over a few hundred people, especially tech people, for example your very likely to get a very very low IE user base compared to the average user ;)

There's some bias, no doubt, and the sample is barely representative. But the thing is that there's lots of new hardware, like Thinkpads, that ships pre-configured with higher DPI. Drop by drop, but this will tilt the scales .. if it hasn't already.

I totally agree, all I'm saying is that the numbers aren't there yet for most software shops, especially if you consider the added costs.

I'd argue that its more akin to supporting IE 11 immediately after its launch - only a small % of your users use it currently, but you can expect the number to grow over time.

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