iMac with Retina 5K display
apple.com
apple.com
They put the "Retina" display in the iMac. This means people will buy it. Higher volume means whoever (LG, I think?) is manufacturing the screens will have to produce more, driving the cost down. That means they will sell variants. Then their competition will also sell competitive options because nobody will want 1080p on a computer screen anymore.
Monitor technology has been stalled for years. This is going to be a gigantic kick in the pants to the industry!
I've been using them for years for inexpensive yet high quality cables, I thought their reputation was pretty well established. Maybe I missed a scandal out there somewhere.
which i believe is true as they have in my experience the best return policy anywhere.
In the cheapest LCD monitors, the brightness control just changes pixel values and doesn't affect the backlight. Hope this one's better, since the claimed brightness of 350 cd/m^2 is far too bright (you should have less than 120 cd/m^2 in a dark room) and is probably bad for your health.
I'd guess they've fixed it, but there's no way you could tell from their "tech specs", which just list the same huge numbers (1.07 billion colors!) as every other manufacturer's LCD.
It's a little worrying to see a Contrast control, too, since that makes no physical sense.
Now I just need to wait for the consumer version of the rift.
Dell's 4K screens came up here yesterday. Here's what I had to say about those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459298
I like DP better than HDMI politically, but if you have a screen with HDMI 2.0 support that's a much safer bet than DisplayPort 1.2 is.
I imagine any HDMI 2.0 4k screens to not use it, and even if they are still on DP 1.2, they would start showing a single display.
Starting with the Samsung U28D590D[1], many 4k displays use single stream transport on DP 1.2.
Also, for 5k, you actually have to wait for DisplayPort 1.3 (if you want 60hz), because there's not enough bandwidth, multi stream transport or not. There's a neat bandwidth calculator at [2].
4k is 11.94 GBit/s without overhead, 5k is 21.23 GBit/s. DisplayPort 1.2 and 1.3 are 17.28 Gbit/s and 25.92 Gbit/s respectively.
This unfortunately means no 120hz 5k displays on even DP 1.3 without compression (which is supported).
[1] http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Displays/Video-Perspective-Sams...
Which makes this announcement quite strange. If this iMac doesn't support Thunderbolt 3 (or whatever standard Apple is planning), it'll never be usable as an external monitor.
IMO, it would have been more Apple-y to launch this and refreshed Mac Pros simultaneously with TB 3, allowing Mac Pros to drive two (or more) 5k displays while the rest of the PC world is still tripping over 4k. But I guess this segment isn't a priority for them any more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#Thu...
With DisplayPort 1.3 now released, I'd be pretty surprised if manufacturers messed around with dual DP 1.2 inputs for displays like Dell's upcoming 5k. Such things are tolerated when there is no alternative, but when it's just a matter of requiring a new video card for a tenth the price of the high end display, that's the only sensible option. This is extreme early adopter tech after all. 5k is yesterday's 4k.
And needless to say, if I'm speculating it's too messy for Dell, Apple won't touch it with a ten foot pole :)
Still, stranger things have happened. If the demand turns out to be there, the products will follow - it's certainly technically possible.
But if DP 1.3 is around the corner, and dual TB would be an ugly hack that is mutually exclusive with the new standard, I could see them steering clear from that.
not true. It has one DVI connector, albeit a dual-link one (the DVI connector supports two concurrent channels).
Source: Me looking at the machine my 30" cinema display is connected to.
In principle, Apple could do something similar again, with an adaptor for two Thunderbolt 2 connectors (from separate buses!) In practice, they'll probably just wait for Displayport 1.3, tho.
[0]: http://www.maximumpc.com/dells_5k_monitor_pre_reviewed_2014
Given that Dell's 5k 27" screen is priced similarly to these iMacs, I think the economies of scale could help push some prices down.
Walk through any best buy and that res will far and away be most common.
I for one welcome our new high-DPI overlords.
1. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KG5LWM4 - eq278c, 27"@2880x1620 = 122ppi, $765
2. http://www.amazon.com/AURIA-EQ308C-30-2880-1620/dp/B00KG5LSB... - eq308c, 30"@2880x1620 = 110ppi, $1075
3. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JR6GCZA - LG 34UM95, 34"@3440x1440 = 110ppi, $999
EDIT: 4k on ~30" is too high resolution. 4k on ~40" is too big/wide.
Also, for the same price, you can get the same 28" 4k Samsung monitor from Amazon (search for samsung u28d590d).
What?
You mean Windows. KDE is iffy (but I use it just fine and was able to scale my fonts / frames up enough on my 150 DPI notebook), but Gnome in its latest release has fantastic high dpi support.
It is an unmentioned consequence of Windows being a piece of shit in regards to DPI that holds back the desktop display industry, whereas Androids inherent scalability let smartphones race for big pixels.
*disclaimer: MS employee who is just enthusiastic about "viva la resolution."
I'm in the market for a retina iMac but expect to turn down the virtual resolution a few notches to make the UI a bit more readable. I find the system text on the non retina 27" machines a bit small, but scaling it up on those panels makes it look crap due to scaling artefacts that just shouldn't happen on a retina panel.
Just to clarify: the scaling artefacts are still there; they're just half the size (and one quarter the area).
Apple is very unlikely to go through the trouble of implementing "pixel tripling" just to accommodate people like you and me, but wouldn't it be sweet? :)
[1]: A rectangle 1706 pixels by 960 pixels contains .93 as many pixels as one 1680 by 1050 contains.
I really don't need Retina-level resolution, though it'd be pleasant. Maybe in a year or two.
But having a single monitor this wide is really a treat, as I never could stand a dual-monitor setup. One of them is going to be your main monitor, facing you, and one of them will be on one side or the other, somewhat ruining the effect of the combined width.
-------
* ---
/ \
*
---
/
*
I would prefer to have one wide monitor, but with a curve.
I'm not sure. I have a 30" widescreen at work I primarily use in isolation (the laptop next to it is pretty puny by comparison), and dualies in a laptop-monitor-monitor arrangement as in Example 2 at home.
The single monitor is wide and requires much scanning, but I think I prefer the experience to multi-monitor window management. I just end up not using the far right screen except in the most necessary situations (design + code + browser)
27" 1440p IPS 120Hz. $450.
But OK, ask me again when I will have been using these resolution monsters for a week :-). If ever, I wish :-).
Many of these new monitors use PWM for brightness which gives headaches
I understand this is a big + for monitors. I have used Dell ultra-sharp 32" @ 3840x2160 with display port and it's fantastic. Larger workspace, better gaming, better multitasking!
I care a lot about text, because that's what I consume almost exclusively day in day out at work and in my spare time when I sit in front of a screen. And nothing profits more from high contrast and high pixel density than text rendering.
I just inherited a Dell XPS 13 with a really nice Full HD screen from a coworker who quit. I've got running Ubuntu on it with a scaling factor of 1.5. Not quite Retina, but pretty sweet nonetheless. I was going to use it with an external screen, but after getting used to this laptop I couldn't stand looking at the external screen anymore and got rid of it. Work (programming and writing) is a lot more fun with this setup.
My spouse just got a 13 inch Retina MBP. She's pretty stoked as well. Even her half blind mom can see the difference.
High resolution screens are great and as sooner they become standard the better.
Going to 5K only about doubles the number of pixels, so it sounds like a solvable engineering problem.
Panels are ready and GPUs are ready; the link layer is why you can't go to Best Buy and buy a 5k monitor. DisplayPort and HDMI both suck.
I will give my firstborn for an 8k* monitor with a 120Hz refresh rate. He or she will probably have kids when I get that, though.
(4k is not that compelling. At 32" it's only 140ppi, which is nothing approaching "retina" levels.)
...one would hope that you're not viewing the 32" 4K monitor at the same distance you would view your phone from. Comparing PPI of a 32" screen to a 6" one is rather meaningless as the viewing distance is going to be vastly different.
The Chromebook Pixel has a nice resolution. That's 240ppi.
The ultimate watermark will be retina-level resolution for devices like the Oculus Rift, allowing you to move your eyeballs all around and see real-life-quality graphics.
Which is where you demonstrated that you are a power user. Most consumer systems don't even come with discrete graphics cards anymore.
Consumer systems took a big backwards leap when integrated graphics became the norm again. They're running several years behind the discrete cards someone like you or I might buy.
Also those games aren't too graphically demanding tbh, l4d2 is the newest one and it's over 5 years old.
The only thing that irks me a little is the muscle memory for using the option key for cut-copy-paste in the UI vs the actual ctrl key (ctrl-c etc) in a terminal...
I'm thinking in the same terms I used to think when I was doing home audio. My boss had a set of $10K speakers. Sure, they sounded great, but then I listened to a clients $5k speakers and couldn't tell the difference between his and my bosses speakers. It was as if my ears weren't finely tuned enough to tell.
Of course if you ask my Boss about the difference, he'd take an hour to tell all the differences. To me, the lay person at the time, I couldn't tell.
It doesn't really say, but I would guess it has to do with when you start to see individual pixels.
But gee, one length (viewing distance) is in different units than the other length (screen diagonal size). Hilarious.
The X axis should go from 10 to 60, the Y axis should go from 1ft to 30ft, max.
As it is, it's not all that useful for figuring out what the density limits of a desktop monitor are. (Average desktop monitor sizes occupy maybe 1/12 of the X axis!)
Then simple trig tells us that we are maxed out when:
(distance to screen) * sin(0.3 arcminutes) = pixel size
The new iMac has a 27 inch diagonal, and 5874 pixel diagonal, so its pixel size is 0.004596 inches. Plug that in above, and you can see that you would have to be 53 inches from the screen to be maxing out your visual abilities. Anything closer (like normal) and you actually could still benefit from higher resolution.
But a shim interface to make one component work with another? Thats the business of millions of companies out there.
Apple is actually pretty awesome like this.
They are better than anyone else at that simply because nobody else really sees the whole product as their own problem. I.e. each hardware/software/service maker is just optimizing their part.
Obvious in retrospect, but just another example of how Apple treats their product range as a complete ecosystem.
Few companies can get away with such a relatively narrow selection of hardware products. Dell for example has dozens of laptop models. By only having a few models, Apple making a big change to one results in a big chunk of the overall market including that feature.
Once you notice where a dead subpixel is though, your eye goes straight to it every time it's visible.
I wonder if this is actually true, the whole "more pixels than photosensitive cells" thing sounds a bit shaky.
Second, the number of rods and cones has nothing to do with it.
The "retina" argument was about having smaller than discernible angular pixel sizes, which is true for the majority of people and normal viewing distances.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
Just because we can't identify individual pixels does not mean a single pixel has no influence. It shapes the overall picture.
If a single dead pixel is not visible at all, why have that pixel there in the first place -- working or not?
I just tested with my iPhone 6 (a 1334x750 px white picture with a single black pixel in the middle of the picture), and the single black pixel is definitely visible. A screenshot of the iPhone showing the picture in question confirms it's a single pixel on the screen.
I have one on my 15" rMBP, and I do not notice it unless I put my face within 6" of the screen.
Perhaps what happens is they just get resold as Non-Apple Displays. So, the no dead pixel displays go into the premium Apple monitors, but the Class I devices get resold in the white-label market. (This is where you see these great deals on eBay).
>did a custom controller for the display timing (Timing Controller (TCON))
Apple doesnt produce displays, they dont design TCONs - Tcon is a pcb sitting directly behind glass driving individual crystals, and is designed and manufactured by the same company making the display. Also every Tcon is custom, and build to drive particular type of screen.
Yes, when Dan Rissio says "we manufactured this screen' he is LYING TO YOU. They bought whole thing from LG or Sharp.
AMD doesnt support DP 1.3 yet, so only way for 5K resolution is bonding two 3K screens together, this is so innovative IBM did it 15 years ago in T220.
> retina type rendering
you mean scaling down? this is what GPUs do best, out of the box.
Yes, this screen is amazing. But dont act like its something revolutionary touched by Noodly Appendage.
You really think the largest company in the world (by market cap) doesn't actively collaborate with its source companies and do custom designs created by its internal engineers together with the supplier's engineers?
It's not a lie if "we" refers to Apple together with its partners or "manufacture this screen" refers to the combination of LG/Sharp's screen with Apple technology.
Is it a lie when Google says it created Android without mentioning the creators of Linux or Java? Is it a lie if Intel says it manufactures a CPU without mentioning the manufacturers of the silicon wafers?
Dude, it's marketing, which I'm not a fan of. But be fair.
You have really swallowed the Apple hateraide it seems.
TCON's that can handle a single logical 4K display are just hitting the market, and Apple has one shipping today to handle 5K. A timing controller may be simple tech, but it's cool that they're so far ahead of the curve.
So I rather have the choice among powerful GPUs, with drivers kept up to date to the latest OpenGL versions (separately from OS versions), then having retina support.
In other words, buy a Retina Cinema Display, get the computer to power it for free.
[1]: http://www.maximumpc.com/dells_5k_monitor_pre_reviewed_2014
Update: it works in 60Hz @ 4K.
It has a lot of compatibility problems, and is hacky as hell. I doubt Apple would adopt this as an official/first-class solution to anything.
Solving "compatibility problems" is what Apple do best by requiring you have an Apple Mac Pro and an Apple Cinema Display and not supporting any other configuration
I was really against buying the glossy screen but the matte looks washed out compared to the glossy. If your display is around 60% or above brightness then you really dont have a glare issue.
The annoying thing is that it's nearly impossible to find a glossy screen on the market.
An artist friend of mine has what is essentially a white cotton muslin curtain that goes around their work area which keeps reflections down to near zero (without being in the dark) and only uses glossy displays. It would drive me nuts but I see the attraction.
And if you're using a laptop outside of a home/personal office environment (which laptops are presumably built for), you don't have control over lighting either.
For tablets and mobile devices which generally aren't used for working at long stretches, I guess I can see the appeal. But it's really strange to me that glossy is popular on machines people do use for long-stretch work -- and often in high-glare overhead lighting open-plan offices.
(And not only popular, but increasingly the only available option.)
AR coatings on touch screens are problematic because skin oils make visible marks, but on non-touch glossy screens they should be standard. Indeed, back in the CRT era, it was routine for high-end CRTs to be coated.
I have noticed that Apple is using a coated screen for at least one model of MacBook Air, but for some reason they don't seem to have fully embraced coated screens.
When I made an exception and bought a notebook with glossy display I regretted that a short time later. Glossy display? Never again!
I can understand why Apple is not in a hurry to sell this just as a display. This display could likely not be driven at all by all of their most popular Macs: all the MacBooks and the Mac mini. Maybe it would work with the Mac Pro, but that’s it. And that Mac Pro is probably not the best selling Mac, by a large margin. So they would basically sell this display that only works with a Mac Pro.
I can understand how that might seem like a wasted effort until at least a couple more widely selling Macs support the display. Maybe when the MacBook Pros can do it they will start selling just the display.
With the iMac the advantage is that Apple is delivering it with a computer that definitely can push those pixels, so you dodge all compatibility woes that will plague these high-res displays for a couple more years. It seems like the still had to get in there and do some weird custom stuff and maybe that’s just hard or impossible to do if you have to do it in a display that is hooked up to some random GPU from Apple’s past Macs.
This was very nice when the view connection was DVI, but the current ThunderBolt connections limit it to other systems with ThunderBolt and the appropriate drivers. This limits it to pretty much using the display with other Macs.
My quick review of the Apple's tech spec for the new iMac doesn't say if it has this feature.
DP1.2 however only supports 4k resolutions.
Not sure about having to be an Apple keyboard- probably works with any keyboard as long as you know which key is mapped to command. (Usually the "OS" key).
"The new Retina iMac does not work as an external display."
Funny thing, it was also the case for the first 27" imac
The scrolling transition at the top of this page really impressed me.
Monitors keep getting wider, web pages keep getting narrower and longer :-)
I also like how (about 3/4 down the page) they capture the background iMac image on the left and keep it "sticky" during scroll, but not completely stationary -- it still responds and gives slight feedback, which makes it 99% less annoying. Nice.
"4k monitor": 3824 x 2160
"5k monitor": 5120 x 2880
That's a lot of pixels.
It might be a good idea to be skeptical about spending >$1,500 on a 27-inch monitor in Q4 2014. It's difficult to notice any pixelation on a 27" screen at a resolution of 2560x1440, so clearly the reason to upgrade to 5120x2880 is for the extra screen workspace. But unless you have very good vision, you're probably not going to be able to read text at 5120x2880 without zooming. What's the advantage?
For $1,000 you can buy two 27" 2560x1440 monitors, which is a huge amount of workspace. Also, a single $300 midrange GPU can drive both monitors at full resolution. A couple years ago, that was cutting-edge tech, but it cost ~$2600. Also, two monitors offer a better user experience than one monitor, since window management is a bit easier.
Would anyone mind explaining whether the pros of a 5k monitor outweigh the hefty pricetag?
Although I'm not sure how the display quality compares, that'll be for e.g. Anandtech to test. And other 5k monitors are in the same price range as the imac (except without the computer part)
It would be very nice to be able to display full 4K detail or side-by-side 1080p videos for editing purposes. Photo editing will be great too, though you will have to resort to 'physical zoom' (i.e. moving your head closer) to do serious pixel peeping, rather than the old and probably superior technique of blowing up the pixels to larger than you'd see them normally.
For gaming and such.... I'm not really sure. Downsampling is now the name of the game, i.e. rendering above the display rez and dropping it down, which has nice effects on IQ. Rendering 14.7 million pixels is a hell of a task to start with, and then you start getting all manner of masks, per-pixel effects, etc... the demands really multiply. Plus there's also a focus on high framerates, like 120, which we're not going to see at 4K or 5K for a gooood long while. It'll be years before things catch up at the mid-tier level of processors and GPUs. And 8 GB of RAM, I hardly need add, is entirely insufficient.
tl;dr: for today's flat desktop purposes, probably not necessary but could be nice. for gaming and other purposes, probably reaching too far. but it's still a nice trend.
Not once you are used to a retina display. I have both a retina Macbook Pro, and a 27" iMac. It is actually really obvious, especially when looking at text.
> you're probably not going to be able to read text at 5120x2880 without zooming
This is correct, unless you use the standard retina resolution which is like 2560x1440 except doubled, so everything is the same size just much nicer looking.
On the new 5K iMac you won't perceive a bigger workspace^ than you had on the previous (2560x1440) model, because all UI elements will be scaled up at the factor of two, practically making everything look twice as sharp.
^: Actually, just like with the retina MacBooks, you'll have the option to use alternative resolutions up to 5K with and without scaling, effectively creating a larger virtual workspace.
I never had this problem before getting the rMBP however, so maybe I'm just getting picky!
But if all you are doing is text editing, you may be right about the value.
On the other hand if you are doing 4K video editing or designing mobile apps, this is a great tool.
My predication is that once we see Apple deploy Thunderbolt 3 / DisplayPort 1.3 (capable of 25.9Gbps usable bandwidth [1]), we'll see the Apple Cinema Display Retina.
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...
DisplayPort v1.2 can carry around 17.3Gbps (this is minus overhead), so you would need DP v1.3 with an effective rate of 26Gbps to support native at 5k without compression [1].
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...
14745600pixels x 3 colours, 1 byte each = 44236800 bytes
44236800/1024/1024 = 42.19MB each frame
42.19MB per frame x 60 frames a second = 2531.25MB.
TB2 has a bandwidth of 20Gbps = 2560MB/s
So yeah, theoretically TB2 has enough bandwidth. But it's a very tight fit.
DisplayPort v1.3 can deliver 25.92Gbps of usable bandwidth, thus required for 5k [1].
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...
I imagine that they preferred shipping with a default 8GB and selling a $200/600 RAM upgrade than having a higher headline price.
(Incidentally, their 1GB phones still outperform phones that are one year newer with 2GB of RAM, double the cores and nearly double the GHz, so maybe they're onto something.)
That is a software not a hardware limitation (in particular, I think it is in Intel's MRC). ASUS has firmware with modified MRC code that can support it.
Once the consumer chipsets move up to DDR4, you will have support for 64 GB of RAM on the desktop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29
12GB of RAM (up to 64GB) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
The mac pro line always had xeon processors.. so it seems odd that you would expect the same memory support on a desktop.
On the other hand, beyond 32GB, ECC seems to be very important so you probably won't have any choice but to buy a proper workstation unless AMD makes a miraculous processor on par with i7 (as they do support ECC in all models).
What do you mean by non-linear? Are you referring to an equation containing a linear combination of the dependent variable and its derivatives, or something else?
Stabilization seems pretty linear to me, though.
Most importantly, technology/creative professionals that care about the ram and the apple platform will gladly pay the premium for 32gb.
OS X (in my case, Mountain Lion, so an old version) - does really, really well with shared libraries. 95%+ of consumer users (not pros, whose needs are obviously more rarified, and for whom the sky is the limit) are probably fine with 8GB of memory, and it's not something I would recommend them increasing unless they plan to hold onto the computer for more than 5 years.
Once the shared libraries are in memory, memory usage grows really, really slowly for my application set (listed above) on OS X.
I'm not saying that 8 GB will last forever - I'm just saying, as a power user who has zero need for more than 8GB right now, that 8 GB on OS X will be just fine for about 95% of average consumer use. Absolutely would not recommend upgrading an iMac's memory unless you are really certain you are going to hang onto it for more than 5 years - not the best use of $200.
I'm just talking about your average family use; for vertical niches (Video Work, Graphics Design, Heavy Industrial Programs, Databases) - obviously those people will assess their situation and make a decision that is optimized for their circumstances.
Which numbers are you reading for this? The "memory use" total includes lots of irrelevant things like files read once during boot and optimistically cached for later, so you can expect it to be nearly 100% of installed memory at all times.
You're not in a memory pressure situation until you have an actual performance problem or the swap space starts growing.
But if you are having performance problems, I'm pretty sure someone cares deeply about them and would like to know the per-process memory use.
That being said - the overall price considering it includes a 5k screen is pretty damn good.
Can you elaborate on this, or link to someone who has elaborated on it?
http://www.digitalstormonline.com/unlocked/video-memory-usag...
Plus the iMac costs the same and is an actual computer.
Are we 3.5 years, or 4 years now since the original retina macbook was introduced ?
What's more shocking to me is the dearth of PC laptops using high resolution; and Microsoft's inability to support HiDPI with any sort of efficiency.
What's more shocking to me is the dearth of PC laptops using high resolution
* Toshiba Kirabook * Lenovo Y50 4K * HP EliteBook (2560) * Dell XPS 11 (2560) * Samsung Series 9 (2560)
You can buy laptops well above 1080p today... if you so desire. Hell, you could have bought them 2 years ago.
Those who do care have _plenty_ of options. Windows based (Kirabook or Lenovo 4k), Mac based (Macbook Pro).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#3rd_generation_.28...
It's waiting on Intel to ramp up Broadwell production.
I don't know, how long ago is late 2012?
It takes roughly 17.2Gbps of bandwidth to drive a 4K @ 60 fps signal in a single stream (Single Stream Transport); DisplayPort 1.2 has just enough bandwidth to support a single 4K @ 60 fps SST stream, but 5K is far too large for the standard. This iMac comes stock with an R9-M290X(2012 GPU) which supports up to DisplayPort 1.2. To get the bandwidth needed for 5k@60hz on DP1.2, Apple would have to overclock the DisplayPort signal by 50-100% on single stream transport.
It seems like the M295X upgrade is a necessity for this thing to render well.
Many computer users suffer from eye strain because they have to stare to resolve the information; their eyes dry and then each blink causes tiny scratches which over time causes serious damage.
This is an example of all the sites that I've found: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pr...
It says ...
One size that Apple does not offer is the actual native resolution of each display, no doubt because icons, text and other interface elements are too small for just about anyone to read.
In any event, the issue is customers should check if this product will actually render the full 5k resolution without hacking and if it is usable at the resolution. It is abusive to sell a product with a spec that you can't actually use. But Apple is all about form over function.
> It is abusive to sell a product with a spec that you can't actually use.
Ya, if pixels and space were the same thing, Apple should be sued! Thankfully they aren't.
> But Apple is all about form over function.
Because good looking rendering of vectors and fonts is only about form and doesn't improve function. For sure. </sarcasm>
I used a 15" macbook pro retina for 2 years pretty much 8 hours a day and noticed my eye sight deteriorating rapidly. I thought it was just the hours I was logging in front of a computer screen and thought 'well atleast I'm using a retina screen'. But now that I've stopped using the macbook and have moved to an old 20" lcd screen and working on Windows 7, I find that my eyesight has recovered significantly. I can read road signs and my ability to change focus has improved.
I'm not sure what the explanation could be but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that your eyes are actually more stressed when they try to resolve the denser retina pixels.
Any one have any insight?
It's more likely to be down to the size of fonts and visual elements. Would you say the font sizes you viewed on the MBP were smaller or larger than those on the 20" display? (As perceived by you, not necessarily as displayed on the screen as viewing distance is also a factor). It may be the smaller screen size caused you to zoom out of content to fit more on the screen. That would have a far grater impact on eye strain.
The fact that smaller text would be crisp and readable on a retina display may have encouraged you to zoom out more than you might do on a lower resolution display though, so the retina display isn't totally off the hook as a contributing factor.
Thanks for the reply, yea I think this is the most likely culprit. Though, looking at the font size of Xcode right now it doesn't seem to be any smaller than this text I'm typing on my 20" monitor. At one point a year into working on the macbook I thought it could have been the brightness so I did change my Xcode background to black and used a program called 'flux' to reduce my screens brightness but it really didn't offer much relief.
For some reason unknown to me, the light emitted by the LED backlight in my life (in an iPad 2) tend to cause a little unpleasant tension in me, but the CCFL backlights in my life (in an HP w2007 monitor and in a Samsung LN32A450 television set) do not.
(All MBPRs have LED backlights.)
Most media consumption is done on 1080p or below, not everyone is fortunate to stream 2K or 4K content yet and we are pushing to 5K.
Huh? The aspect ratio of the 27-inch iMac is 16:9.
Anyway, point is the 5K was the result of finding the sweet spot among several pixel-count factors.
Highly peronal: I hate all the marketing retina HD bla bla shit from Apple, but I love these beautiful iMacs. I want one :-).
Lest people think OpenCL is somehow at odds with NVIDIA: "The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," [1]
The Vice President of NVIDIA is (was?) the chair of the OpenCL working group (and president of the Kronos group).
[1] First of all, when you need on the order of thousands to tens of thousands of threads to saturate your cores, memory becomes a big issue again. Your threads have maybe 400k usable memory. Memory bandwidth is usually even a more important limitation - these systems have 2-3 times less bandwidth per physical thread than CPUs. This can be mitigated using a programming model that uses bandwidth very efficiently (e.g. stream programming like in CUDA, OpenCL) - an area where GPUs are traditionally more advanced, since they deal with this limitation since a long time. Don't get me wrong though, Intel will probably catch up at some point.
throw up
MacBookPro 13'' Retina - choppy scroll in Chrome
So, the more advanced, 4x higher pixel count laptop was the worst in speed.
Unless Apple provide a multi-cable solution for the 2013 Mac Pro when the 5k Thunderbolt display comes out, you won't be able to take advantage of 5k displays on it.
My prediction is that we'll see an updated Mac Pro that also uses the Haswell Xeons (2013 Mac Pro uses last gen Ivy Bridge) and also DP v1.3 (which can support 5k displays).
Update: And for anyone wondering whether you can drive the 5K display as an external display using Target Display Mode, Apple has confirme that you cannot. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8623/hands-on-apples-imac-with...
Both companies just announced a bunch of stuff and you're surprised to see it here?
I've got a 4k display, with scaling I have a 1080p looking display and as a result wouldn't want to go any bigger than 24".
This is exactly the display I have been waiting for (only it has a computer inside it).
What I was talking about, however, is that every other company under the Sun that has a relation to displays/media/TVs/whatever is pushing 4K and 8K as the next standards after Full HD. Yet, Apple in their infinite wisdom, go and pull a number out of their asses that isn't evenly divisible into those emerging standards - even if it is easily scalable into them.
Why? What could they possibly gain besides consumer dependence on yet-another piece of proprietary Apple nonsense?
Sure, the points being made about it pushing other companies to develop comparable tech for cheaper stands as Dell selling a display for the same price as an entire Mac computer is ridiculous. But so what? Apple diehards will get a 5K while the rest of the world goes with 4K and 8K, creating unnecessary disparity.
Regarding "proprietary Apple nonsense", I direct you to the recently announced Dell 5k display… http://www.anandtech.com/show/8496/dell-previews-27inch-5k-u...
The rest of the world won't be getting 8k on the desktop for quite a while :) It won't be just Apple who embraces '5k' (quad-1440p).
As to your question why, one advantage is that these monitors can display true pixel-for-pixel 4k video in an editing suite, while still leaving screen real-estate free to display the application user interface, film libraries, etc. Another is that even higher fidelity means less pixelation and smoother color gradations that on a similarly sized 4k display. There are plenty of advantages.
Finally, I don't remember anybody complaining when Dell released their 5k display a few months ago.
http://cl.ly/image/3L1b250W0o1r http://cl.ly/image/1C421h22391Z