Apple Event October 2014 Live Stream

Like many people, my vision took a hit when I turned 40, so I have to disagree with that statement. While YMMV, 1080p on a 27" monitor is not ridiculously low res for the average person.

Anything between 100-130 dpi is more than fine enough with me at my viewing distances.

Speaking only for my use case -- when I'm doing work, I'd prefer a >= 4K resolution that gives me more real estate over one that gives me denser pixels, which is why I would choose a 40" 4K monitor over a 28" 4K monitor, because the pixels on the smaller monitor are simply wasted on my aging eyes.

To me, the main beneficiaries of the new 5K iMac are designers and people who work with (or care a lot about) video and photography. I left gamers out of the list, because I don't know if the R9 M290X is actually powerful enough to drive a game at native res at 60fps.

The question is, how long will it take until high res becomes available broadly? Apple had to create their own¹ display here, and I doubt they'll share the secret sauce lightly. I suspect they're already holding back, since I'm in search for some Hi-Res desktop display for some time now. Almost everybody cheats by simply upping the display size, instead of the pixel density. And it's not like the retina display hasn't been around for 2 years now!

It's either that, or they're simply scooping up all or a significant amount of the available supply for themselves.

¹To some extent, i.e. at least the controller chip

They even say so on the blog post for the FTL JIT:

"Websites today serve large amounts of highly dynamic JavaScript code that typically runs for a relatively short time. The dominant cost in such code is the time spent loading it and the memory used to store it. "

Instead, it's more likely they have some weird benchmarks that they win on.

Everyone has their favorites, and reasons they claim they matter.

While it's been about year since i looked, most of them are just not large enough amounts of executing code to be reasonable benchmarks to argue about (they try to increase workloads bby increasing iterations, etc).

In truth, i can't fault anyone for the benchmarks they choose (except maybe regexp-dna), most are testcases extracted from the websites/programs they care about.

But this does not actually make them good benchmarks to optimize for, just good things to make fast.

The difference being, you want to pick representative benchmarks such that if you optimize for them, ideally all the cases you care about are made fast, not just the ones in the benchmarks.

For example, regex-dna (part of sunspider) is a benchmark about regular expression searching in DNA sequences (which is "not common" in webapps). To make it fast, most browsers have dedicated regular expression compilers tuned to it. This is pretty much worthless for webapps as a whole (the kinds of regexps involved do not generalize to the ones used in web apps), but it makes sunspider fast.

That's exactly what you don't want :)

Note: before a fervent product enthusiast thinks about hitting that downvote button, I've typed this comment from my very own MBP.