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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

I know it's dangerous to armchair speculate about Apple's moves, but it really seems like they should have held out for a true 3x screen instead of compromising on a 1080p. I certainly would never buy the 6+ after reading about their cheesy resolution hack. It feels rushed and short term.

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Keep in mind that it's resampling a 3x image. Display scaling already looks acceptable on retina MacBook Pros [1], and the 6+'s screen is much more high-resolution than that. I agree that this sounds like a terrible idea on paper, but it might not be so bad in practice.

1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...

I think it's actually pretty clever. Developers clearly have trouble writing apps to support arbitrary scale factors. Resolution independence was supposed to be a feature of Windows since Vista was codenamed "Longhorn" (before 2004), and Windows is still a mess on higher-DPI screens 10 years later. Making it so developers only have to think about 1x and 2x and 3x makes the task easier.

Also, look at it this way: with the diminishing returns of resolutions above 300 dpi, is it really a big deal that you won't get the absolute best use of the iPhone 6+'s 400 dpi? Seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off to use that extra resolution in a way that makes resolution-independence easier for developers.

I'm imagining the commentariat's reaction to such a "pretty reasonable trade-off" on a Nexus 5 or a Galaxy S4

Aren't the commentariat always asking "what's the point of going to 1080p or 4k on a 5" display?"

We were until Android phones got higher DPI than retina iPhones ;)

1x 2x 3x is great as developer, but downscaling the result to save a few bucks on the display panel? Not so much.

Its not the cost, its the power usage. The 1080p LG G2 had incredible battery life, while the G3 (according to all the reviews) with 2K screen was a big step backward in battery life.

Normally I'd be right there with you, but at this DPI there shouldn't be any visible scaling artifacts. Normally scaling looks terrible because you're upscaling low res components to a higher res version, but since their source is higher resolution and they're downscaling to an already extremely high DPI screen, you'll probably be hard pressed to find aliasing artifacts without a magnifying glass.

The other reason why I think this might be a good thing is since 1080p is more of a standard than the other resolutions they're playing with, which might help unify things moving forward.

I'll withhold judgment until I see it live, but they did make it work with the MBP Retina (E.g. the 13" will fake 1680x1050 by rendering to a 3360x2100 frambebuffer and downscaling to the 2560x1600 display)

Do you realize that every Retina Macbook Pro out there uses this "cheesy" resolution "hack"?

Tying the size and density of your display to software needs-- especially points that are arbitrary to begin with (as they are based on the original iPhone) seems silly and outdated.

Actually no. Or maybe: yes, but...

My first MPB was one of the "high resolution" ones that ran at 1680x1050 and I loved it. So when I first got my 15" retina MBP was miffed that now it felt like I was running a 1440x900, just with double (well, quadruple) pixel density. So I opened scaling preferences and set it so the retina screen would "emulate" a 1680x1050 display. It was terrible. Blurry and SLOW. Good lord it was slow. And impossible to do any design work on. I went back to normal 2x scale.

So sure, this kind of scaling has been available for a long time but the reality is most people don't scale their MPB retina displays to anything other than 2x.

Eh? I've run my rMBP at 1680x1050 for over two years. It's not blurry or (appreciably) slow, though I'll admit I'm using it more for development work more than heavy design work.

I guess YMMV... I also had to get my screen replaced because it was one of the small number of screens that had severe burn-in issues.

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