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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.