Well to be fair, it's been several years since I've heard anyone call an SUV a Jeep (other than a Jeep), a tissue a Kleenex, or a copy machine a Xerox. But Zipper was a brand name?? What the hell is the generic product name for a zipper?
Doesn't seem to have a consistent one, clasp fastener or separable fastener are earlier generic terms. BTW Zipper wasn't trademarked by the creator or manufacturer but by BF Goodrich when used on their zipped-up boots.
Two which surprised me were Ping Pong and Adrenaline.
In fact, they should sue all programmers who ever made a zip() function for trademark violations!
(in fact, even more confusingly, most zip() functions don't interleave elements, like zippers do, but return a sequence of paired tuples - this, naturally, gives Zippers a bad name who wants their pants to pairwise join)
It might just be my German origin, but I wouldn't call an SUV a Jeep either. We do however call all of the off road-capable bulky cars with the roll-over protection thingy ("Überrollbügel" in German, can't think of the English equivalent) Jeep.
I've understood that technically the main idea of "retina" is that the physical display pixels no longer map one-to-one with the logical user interface (CSS) pixels. Instead, the retina display appears as a virtual low-resolution screen that is able to utilize higher-resolution images (which would otherwise be scaled down).
So in this sense, I would claim there is a clear technical difference between just higher-resolution screens (more pixels) and retina displays (same pixels but "better looking").
To me this virtualization of pixels seems like a good idea, since the majority of web pages assume pixels have certain DPI range. Operating systems like OSX treat pixels as floats anyway, so if you need subpixel accuracy, it's still possible.
No, the distinction of device pixels vs. CSS pixels predates the first "Retina" iPhone. The distinction existed in all browsers supporting full page zoom, including the Safari on the first iPhone, and in Opera for years before that.
"Retina" is just a marketing term for "pixels so small your eye can't distinguish them at a normal distance anymore".
The distinction is also in CSS specs[0] since version 2.1: “The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. <…> 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch).”
This becomes about semantics, then. If somebody writes an article about "retina displays", I immediately assume it's about this particular way of implementing resolution independence in the browser and in the OS (by doubling/quadrupling the physical resolution while keeping the virtual resolution the same). So as such it serves me better than a generic term that requires additional explanation.
Uh... of course it's about semantics. What josteink was complaining about was the use of a proprietary marketing term to refer to something technical.
Your interpretation is a fine one, but it's not the one that everyone shares. Specifically, it's not the sense that Apple uses the term either. Take a look at Apple's marketing page for the retina display and see if you can find anything about "resolution independence" at all.
So I guess the title of the article should be "Resolution independent high-resolution graphics for your website" then. Retina still communicates the subject better to me, since we all know this is about providing high-res images for iOS devices with Retina displays. Maybe I'm just getting too old to be anal about terminology like this.
There is nothing silly no gimmicky about it.
It is just a catchy name for some technology. There are a lot of similar marketing terms in tech.
Lots more people will understand what you are talking about when you say "retina display" instead of "high-DPI display".
What's high-DPI? What's high-DPI when talking about pentile displays? Not to mention that "retina" is easier to pronounce.
Apple loves simpler names for a reason.
No, it's a gimmick designed expressly to confuse the consumer. Other manufacturers of comparable products, for trademark reasons, can't use the term "retina". So only Apple has "retina".
Intel played a similar trick about 8 years ago with "Centrino". The advertising (for what was essentially just a 802.11b chipset with some added processor/chipset requirements) was so successful that many novice users got fooled into thnking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
> many novice users got fooled into thinking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
Really? Both the claim that many users were "fooled" by the Centrino branding and that this hurt the market for Wi-Fi devices seem highly implausible to me. I don't think I heard anyone use the term "Centrino" outside of Intel PR and reporting thereupon, whereas Wi-Fi had made it into the vernacular at least a decade ago.
The only other trademark for the 802.11 series of standards that got any traction at all was Apple's AirPort, and even their OS calls it Wi-Fi now.
Yes, really. I had to explain to numerous relatives the distinction between "Centrino" and "Wifi". How old are you? Were you engaged with people who were actively buying laptops at the time? Were you engaged on the subject outside the tech community? The Centrino television ads were pervasive, everyone knew what they were about, and no one at the time had ever heard of a laptop that could get on the internet without a wire.
(edit: your remark about AirPort makes this clearer on reflection: you were a mac user at the time, and familiar with Apple products much more than PCs. Outside the mac world, as you might expect, literally no one had heard of an "AirPort". So you were insulated from Intel's nonsense, essentially.)
It's the same thing here. We have "retina.js" being pushed around as a solution for what is clearly a manufacturer-independent problem. Yet on it's face it appears to be Apple-only software. You don't think that constitutes harm to the market?
> The Centrino television ads were pervasive, everyone knew what they were about, and no one at the time had ever heard of a laptop that could get on the internet without a wire.
Apple introduced laptops with Wi-Fi (calling it "AirPort") in 1999, five years before your "eight years ago". Starbucks first started rolling out Wi-Fi (calling it "Wi-Fi")in 2001, and had most of their stores offering it by 2003. It was not an obscure technology eight years ago.
I'm sure whenever non-geeks go shopping for a computer, in any era, there are a variety of marketing terms that need to be explained to them. And yes, I'm old enough to have run through that exercise a few times. But that's not really evidence that "Centrino" hurt the growth of Wi-Fi any more than the way-more-prevalent "Pentium" branding hurt the '90-'00's highly competitive CPU market that gave us 2+GHz x86-64's.
Wi-Fi adoption rates were exceptional for a new computing technology, especially one that required infrastructure beyond what could be put "in the box".
Just like Apple was a couple of years ahead of the curve on Wi-Fi and called it AirPort, they're a couple of years ahead of the curve on double-res displays, too. I don't see how them putting the name "Retina" on those displays (while even in the OS they're still calling it Hi-DPI!) is going to harm what's surely going to be an explosion of high resolution screens in the next few years.
Really. I worked as a laptop salesman when Intel introduced the term "Centrino". I had to explain to many customers that yes, this other laptop that happened not to use an Intel chipset also worked wirelessly.
To get a Centrino sticker, a laptop had to use an Intel chipset, Intel wireless adapter and Intel CPU. Because the marketing for Centrino focussed almost exclusively on Wifi capability, there were many laptops with non-Intel chipsets or AMD CPUs that were perceived by customers as not being capable of wireless networking.
This article[1] explains how Wi-Fi wasn't very popular until the Centrino campaign.
That's essentially an Intel press release (follow the author link).
Anyway, I'm perfectly content to believe that Centrino and Intel's multimillion dollar marketing campaign for it really helped the growth of Wi-Fi. The parent post claimed the opposite: That the branding "hurt the market" for Wi-Fi, which seems absurd.
I fail to see your point. All companies give trademarked names to their products, and to specific features of their products (especially the features that are used heavily in marketing).
Apple is welcome to give any name they want to their product. But when they confuse users to the extent that otherwise-smart web developers start producing "retina.js" to manage resolution independent images (hardly an Apple-specific problem!) then the practice has gone too far.
Who's else is making high-DPI displays? I have really seen companies running with this. It would be nice to see Samsung, for example, start promoting 300 dpi screens so they go mass market.
Sony's Xperia S have 338 PPI which is even more dense than Apples "retina display". So there are other companies using high dpi displays. Galaxy Nexus is at 316 PPI if I remember it correctly. HTC has a phone, Vigor, that has 342 PPI. So apple is certainly not the only company out there who likes pixels :)
Even though the term "retina display" may be a gimmick, I think the creator of retina.js specifically designed it with Apple devices, and Apple's developer documentation, in mind (case in point: usage of the @2x modifier).
DPI i just incorrect. Use PPI if you really insist on that name.
That said, there is nothing gimmicky about the retina name. It's a device where distance to the display, resolution and screen size are such that someone with normal vision cannot distinguish between pixels.
High-PPI does not in any way pack the same information. It’s ambiguous and unclear.
The only thing that’s bad about retina is that Apple uses it like a trademark. I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays (because they are), but that’s not possible. Luckily everyone else is busy taking away that name from Apple (for example by naming their software like that).
It's a device where distance to the display, resolution and screen size are such that someone with normal vision cannot distinguish between pixels.
It is a post-development sales pitch used to pitch as a differentiation the fact that Apple's naive scaling required them to grossly overshoot the mark. Competitive products already had excellent displays before Apple decided that they had no choice but catch up.
I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays
Why would you love it? "Retina" display is a misnomer -- unless the device is a fixed distance from my eyes, and it is specifically geared for my eyes specifically, it is horse shit to call it a retina display. It is ignorant marketbabble that lowers us all.
Oh come on. Apple’s iPhone and iPad barely hits the mark there. They are overshooting nothing.
It’s a petty good approximate term that to my mind works perfectly well. Sure, things change depending on view distance but I guess nerds have to survive a term that’s not always exact. The horror!
That was an uninformed rant on your part. What are you suggesting as an alternative? High-PPI certainly does not work.
Apple’s iPhone and iPad barely hits the mark there.
Do you actually believe that the magical "retina" mark just coincidentally happened to be 2x Apple's original resolutions? How convenient!
It’s a petty good approximate term
It's a marketing term that the stupid embrace. Is a 64Kbps mp3 "eardrum audio" in a standard room with a fan? Is 128Kbps eardrum audio on a crummy mp3 player?
That was an uninformed rant on your part
What was uninformed about it? Desperately curious to hear what.
It's a high-DPI display. Lots of devices have it. Lets not attempt to pretend there's anything Apple-specific about that.