After introducing Retina displays and graphics.. Apple has unknowingly disrupted the whole display industry. Suddenly all of us now start noticing pixels on our laptop screens as well as HDTVs, which existed since a long time now. I believe this will actually thrust the current internet into a new era of HD internet and soon computer makers and tv makers will jump onto making high pixel density displays. This makes sense. Till now, all was about resolutions and the larger the resolution the smaller the icon, window etc in the OS world. Apple's retina implementation has changed that. You still see things in the same size or aspect ratio but the sharpness is 4 times that of what we used to see earlier, making the whole data consumption experience to be overwhelming.. Kudos to Apple for this. I hope most of the internet 2.0 and display manufacturers are thinking alike on this..
The main place that pixels were noticeable was in an Apple store. Next to the iPhone 4, the older iPads looked much less sharp, at least for text (particularly Computer Modern). There have been lots of attempts at resolution independence, and I'm sure Windows and various Linux GUIs have hooks for such, but they've not been tested much because the hardware was generally in the 96-120 ppi range. There's no need for HDTVs to change.
