News - Retina displays coming to MacBooks at a premium

[HEXUS]

Estimated extra $100+ for the option.

Read more.

[warejon9]

With that many pixels, won't there need to be a serious increase in GPU grunt, especially in 3D stuff?

[Bluecube]

For 2D applications, the extra pixels will barely be noticed by modern graphics cards. 3D is another matter of course!

I'll be upgrading my MBP when the new model is released. I'm not sure if I'll go for a Retina display as I can't see the benefit.

[dcwt2010]

Well you can just do pixel doubling for games but I'm just glad Windows laptop makers aren't following suit yet; Windows has never been good at scaling with resolution. That's something which the iOS does very well... c'mon Microsoft, sort it out!

[b0redom]

There are rumors that they'll be doing the same on the iMacs too. That would be a MONSTER res, something like 5120x2880.

It would need a hugely powerful GPU to cope with 3d at anything approaching that res.

[DDY]

While I think 2560x1600 is excessive, I hope it will encourage other laptop manufactures to offer higher resolution options because it seems like 95% of current 12-14" laptops are only available at 1366x768.

[Jonatron]

Anyone know if Windows 8 will be any good on very high DPI displays?

[Biscuit]

While I think 2560x1600 is excessive, I hope it will encourage other laptop manufactures to offer higher resoloution options because it seems like 95% of current 12-14" laptops are only available at 1366x768.

Thats what im certainly hoping for!

[AGTDenton]

People pay £100 for cellular capability of the iPad, so people will pay for this minor addon to the MacBook

[jim]

Can't wait until this filters through to proper monitors.

Should've been done years ago.

[Arthran]

I for one look forward to my new 4XHD 24" monitor!

[BerZerk]

Excellent for watching the future 2K movies....

Oh my MBA display is soon to be old kit...

[ca197]

Well you can just do pixel doubling for games but I'm just glad Windows laptop makers aren't following suit yet; Windows has never been good at scaling with resolution. That's something which the iOS does very well... c'mon Microsoft, sort it out!

I beg to differ... Windows 7 has a huge DPI range suitable for 96 to 300dpi screens. Ok some of the screens elements scale badly but over all its very usable (Well unless you have multiple screens). OSX on the other hand has no DPI settings at all (No the developer options don't count and do suck). Basically with a Mac the UI elements use a fix pixel structure and as such go up in dpi and the elements just get smaller. A 17" Mac book pro with a 1920x1080 screen can be very trying on the eyes.

The retina display is just a doubling of the standard resolution with a second set of UI Elements with a higher resolution. There is zero scaling involved.

As to which approach is better.... that's subjective. The retina display will look amazing but will still have the same fixed DPI limitations as is forced on it by OSX. Windows would be amazing if the UI elements were actually vector and scaled without blurring.

In the long run we all get nicer monitors. Win Win.

[Agent]

Good - we've been stuck at 1920 for way too long.

It's annoying when the Sony FW900 supported over 1920, was widescreen, had a better refresh rate, practically no motion blur (CRT) and was just as sharp as modern TFT's....coming up to 10 years ago.

TFT's have become stale due to the mass market being happy with them. The home user isn't usually going to require anything close to 1920, which means they have only really been used by high-end users. In turn it seems that there hasn't been a push past it due to this.
Such a shame.

I need to get my hands on a 120Hz TFT and try it, because I've never been happy with TFTs compared to CRTs

[keithwalton]

I see they are going to try and pull a fast one and redefine 'retina' becuase you sit a bit further away from a laptop than a phone / tablet. As I thought the original definition was 300+ dpi, these new panels although nice fall way short of that.

[kingpotnoodle]

I have a 27" 2560*1440 monitor, and things seem quite small on that, I can *just* use Windows default dpi setting, if I raise it text is great but some poor 3rd party apps and most icons scale like crap. Vector icons FTW.

That resolution on anything smaller = nightmare. On my monitor web pages are like a strip down the middle, there is much use of zoom needed, trouble is many web pages scale like a Windows icon - i.e very badly and look ****tocrap.

Don't honestly think going beyond 1920x1080 at anything below 15" is worthwhile, and 1680x1050 seems fine for < 13.3", the poor GPUs are going to be crying. The rest of the world needs to catch up to higher res first, a gradual change is probably better than a sudden doubling.