> This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook Pros.
Which is probably never. Those don't even reach the pixel density of the 2G/3G/3GS. 326ppi? That's already going to be pretty tall order on a 10" screen (the iPad currently stands at 132 ppi, assuming the form factor doesn't change we're talking about increasing the resolution by a factor of 2.5, pumping the resolution to an insane 2560x1920. We're talking about a resolution usually found on 30" computer screens here, and those things are still pretty much all between $1000 and $2000...).
The 13.3" macbook pro would have a 3712x2320 screen, the 15.4" would move up to 4200x2625 and the 17" would be sporting a 4000x3000 screen.
30 years ago, you were lucky if you had a 300 bps acoustic modem. 20 years ago 9600 bps was considered state of the art. I am writing this while sitting in Peets in Los Altos where I have a 54,000,000 bps wireless connection, not to some local BBS, but to this much larger, almost unimaginably (at least it would have been to me in 1980!) complex structure, the internet.
In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image processing.
We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily. The OSes have some attempts at support for UI scaling, but none works well enough to run all of the popular software decently at 200dpi.
Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.
Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily.
I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.
If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?
I mean that things just don't look or act right. Try firing up Quartz Debug (if you have a Mac), setting the UI Resolution scale factor to 2, and restarting some apps. Every app I checked has problems.
For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly. Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly. The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons. Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale factor.
Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.
World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login screen on the other three quarters.
Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior defects.
The Apple Lisa also had a keyboard with 77 keys while a regular MacBook keyboard has 78 keys.
Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.
There clearly is lots of innovation going on, but 54 Mbps wireless hardware was introduced over 11 years ago!
Furthermore, AT&T's DSL speed has only exhibited a .15 Mbps CAGR over the past 5 years to its current peak of 6 Mbps. Comcast's average cable internet speeds were 6 Mbps from 2005 to 2007, until they jumped to 12 Mbps in 2008.
Both handhelds and desktops have been increasing in resolution, and decreasing in cost, for years. There's no reason for that trend to stop until all displays reach 'retinal indifference' at their usual viewing distance. I would not be surprised to see 4000x3000 LCDs in laptops in the next decade.
> Both handhelds and desktops have been increasing in resolution, and decreasing in cost, for years.
That's not entirely correct. 24" at 1920x1200 and 30" at 2560x1600 is something that's been there for years, and these days laptops are regressing rather than progressing: in 2005 I had colleagues with 15" laptops in 1920x1200, these days the majority seems to be 16/9 screens in stupid resolutions (1366x768 seems really common these days in entry-level laptops)
> Never is a mighty long time!
My never stands for the Macbooks, and probably the iPad as well. By the time we reach the ability to create such densities with acceptable yields on panes bigger than 10 inches, the current names will long have been retired.
Company's rarely change the name of a well liked product. Consider a 1976 Honda accord vs a 2010 Honda accord. They are vary different cars targeting different markets but as long as people think product X = quality the name tends to stick around.
No, that's the Power Mac. The PowerBook predates the PowerPC by years--the first PowerBook was in 1991, and the first PowerPC-based PowerBook was in 1995, while the first Power Mac was in 1994.
That makes absolutely no sense--the "Power Macintosh" wasn't unveiled until the PowerPC chips were actually shipping, because the brand denoted the presence of the new processor. Why would you name a computer brand after a processor it doesn't have? It's like calling a 386-based 486-era laptop a "Penta" because you anticipate that future versions of it years in the future will have Pentium processors.
You wouldn't need anything like 4000x3000 for 'retinal indifference' using the article's number of 287ppi@12" use distance as a basis for that threshold. 4000x3000 pixels, assuming a 22" screen is about 227ppi. The threshold in the article, translated to a typical working distance for a laptop of 22" is about 156ppi. So a 22" diagonal screen (same aspect ratio as your 4kx3k) would only need 1850 pixels on the short side to hit the 'retinal indifference' number.
Oh, and some other smartphones crossed into retinal indifference at their typical use distance sometime late last year.
I can't imagine that Apple would have gone to the trouble of giving this kind of display a name & logo if they were only intending to use it on one product.
It doesn't have to be 326ppi to be huge news. You probably hold the iPad another 12 inches further away from your eyes than the iPhone, so a smaller, more manageable bump in ppi could mean the same 'retina' result.
> Never is a very long time. Is it really impossible that large high-DPI screens will exist in 5-10 years?
I'm not quite saying that.
I'm saying the birth of those screens is so far away the current brands will very likely have been replaced a long time ago. Those densities on > 10"displays are pie in the sky dreams right now.
I've heard the cost in lcds is far more about the size of the display vs the resolution. Ive seen replacement lcds for projectors, very small lcds with very high resolutions for faily cheap prices.
Smaller than you could ever experience with your finger (about a 90-pixel square area on the iPhone 4), and better than any other phones on the market, apparently.
Not quite. Apple's HIG recommends allotting 44pts for hit targets (about 90px on the new screen) for usability's sake, but you can hit much smaller targets if you're careful about it.
I looked at a iPhone 4G at the apple store yesterday and was curious to compare the display to the HTC Evo 4G's display.
The verdict: slightly better crispness, comparable brightness, comparable color.
The industrial design of the iPhone 4G is superb compared to any other phone (or electronic device) I've seen. It's more comparable to what you'd expect to find in a watch.
Using this article's threshold of 287ppi@12" for "retinal", and the EVO screen specs on wikipedia which give it about 217ppi, it would be retinal at a distance of 15.9".
It seems to me that the black gaps are bigger. I just did a back of the envelope calculation, using the photos he posted and it looks as though black gaps take up about 30 percent of the space on the first and second iPhone while they take up about 40 percent on the new iPhone 4.
I wonder what the effects of that are. It probably just makes the display a bit dimmer (if one were to use the same backlight).
Though I'm not discounting that it may in fact be dimmer:
Larger gaps alone implies dimmer, but this can be accounted for by having the pixels put out more light. Having larger gaps on a display doesn't mean it's dimmer, as the pixels have likely changed characteristics in the process of shrinking them.
(It’s, by the way, not that the gaps got necessarily bigger, maybe a little, it’s just that they didn’t shrink either and, with more pixels, there are also more gaps.)
The article states that it was harder to focus the optics on the older displays, causing the pictures of them to be blurrier, which could explain the apparently larger inter-pixel gaps in the images of the newer display.
In portrait orientation they have the same orientation as pixels on desktop monitors, i.e. the subpixels of individual pixels are next to each other, not on top of each other. (I looked at my third generation iPod touch. Well, I took a macro photo with my trusty Ricoh GR Digital II [1]. The only tool I have with which I can make subpixels – barely – visible. Hm, water drops might work, too, but that seems a bit risky.)
I just checked Safari, they don’t actually do any subpixel antialiasing. Just “normal” antialiasing. I would guess that if it’s not used in Safari it’s used nowhere, so no problems with that :)
(Subpixel antialiasing seems unnecessary with resolutions like that. Heck, even any other kind of antialiasing is beginning to become unnecessary with resolutions like that.)
How about '180 degree viewing angle', 'Quadrupling the resolution on the screen would only increase the clarity at most only three to five percent' and 'the Retina Display is too power-hungry, which drains the battery up to 30% faster than you’d find on their Super AMOLED screens'
Yes, lets all take a competitor's word at face value. And that clarity quote is complete bull, just look at a 3G and a 4G side by side. I like AMOLED screens, but the article is worthless.
How would one calculate clarity? It seems it would be a subjective measurement... maybe they're looking at the phones from 10 feet away?
I've not read that particular link but Samsung have made that only 5% better claim comparing the Retina screen to their slighly lower DPI Super-AMOLED screens. While it seems common to compare it only to the previous iPhone screens, they were no longer state of the art even before the new iPhone.
Super AMOLED consumes 30% less power because it doesn't need back light. It's also thinner. Samsung Galaxy S has 4'' screen and is cheaper than iPhone 4 (with 3.5''). Also LG is unable to produce enough IPS screens for iPad and soon part of the devices will use inferior MVA screens from Samsung. Same can happen with iPhone 4.
Samsung still has not enough capacity to supply its own lines and client lines with their Super AMOLED display. When looking in the future instead, in July 2011 they are supposedly opening a new 5.5 gen plant for AMOLED technology that will allow them an output of 30M 3" displays per month.
According to our sources, Apple had spoken with Samsung Mobile Display about the possibility for AMOLED panels since the development of the iPhone 3GS, but production capacity remains a big issue. SMD only has the capability to fulfill 50-60% of iPhone orders at the moment even it dedicated all AMOLED capacity to Apple.
Of course, cost is always a concern. AMOLED panels cost US$34-38. TN panels cost less than US$10 and IPS panels around US$20.
AMOLED also has display weaknesses. SMD uses PenTile technology developed by Clairvoyante to produce AMOLED, which is less suitable for displaying text. With Apple quite keen on pushing e-reading businesses, AMOLED may not be the best solution at the moment.
I find it very hard to believe that Apple would start using something other than IPS screens on their iPads, considering they advertise it as a feature.
AMOLED has inferior color performance, daytime viewing performance, and angle viewing performance to IPS.
All natively rendered text in controls, etc., looks like it was printed in a magazine.
This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook Pros.