So, the great Apple has divulged their new secret weapon. The 15" Macbook Pro with retina graphics. How long do you think we have to wait before these displays hit regular laptops? Source
How long? Ages. Apple will have basically bought out the supply, and I doubt there's many suppliers in the first place. Throw in the fact that they'll be wanting them in 13" and 11" sizes in the future, and I can see a lot of demand and not much supply.
This is probably the first reason I have come across to ever find apple computers worthy of my money still will be a huge rip off, but good nonetheless
It looks like it won't present itself as 2880x1800 to the system, but rather as 1440x900 with retina capability for compatible apps if i understood correctly. I somehow doubt they would do it other way around (2880x1800 display with manual listing of apps which will have to use doubled pixels). And $2200 for base model (which equals to €2100 at least) is way more than i am willing to pay for any laptop . PS: Actually i miss the new Mac Minis so far .
That system would make a lot of sense, giving a fall-back mechanism for apps that aren't updated. It'll be interesting to say the least, but the cost is really rather high (UK price I'm guessing at £1799?)
If I had £1500+ for a laptop, I'd only ever consider a Macbook.. The problem is that I'd feel oh so dirty buying anything from Apple, and for about £500 you get a very very decent system capable of many things. I have a screen with a decent resolution on my Lappy as it is, but that almost seems too higher a res for any noticeable difference. I've used the display on the iPhone 4, and after about 2 days the novelty wears off. I just have a horrible feeling this will be lauded from the rooftops by fan boys who know nothing about anything, a la all things Apple.
I wonder what one of those displays + an adapter to use it as a standalone display would cost.. You could make one hell of an eyefinity setup with that
I think your GPU would cry in a corner. I'm suprised the 650M is considered enough grunt to be honest.
There is a lot of excitement about these super high res displays, and on the whole I welcome them, but there are still significant challenges to be overcome. The first and biggest hurdle is all the existing software out there with fixed dimensions in pixels, which would become absolutely tiny at such a huge resolution on a small screen. I think the figure I saw was 220 ppi, which would be 86.6 pixels per centimetre. Now, take a GUI element, for example the close button at the top right of a window in Windows 7. At standard settings, that is 19 pixels in height, which would be just under 2.2 millimetres on such a display. Less than a quarter of a centimetre. Yikes. Now of course you can change the settings, increase font sizes, increase the display DPI in system settings, etc... but the simple fact is much (most?) software does not scale well when you change these settings - they end up looking pretty messed up. We need a fundamental change in the way interfaces are designed to cope with such high pixel density. The second major factor that springs to mind is source video files. Sure 2880x1800 would look superb IF you had a video encoded at that resolution, but I don't think I've ever seen a video file saved at anything above 1920x1080. We need new standards, and the size of resulting files could be truly massive by current standards - it would tax even the ability of things like Blu-ray, and forget about streaming. The third is of course gaming - we have reached a point at the moment where high end cards are easily powerful enough, but lets say we scale up that display tech of 2880x1800 for a 15" screen to be the equivalent for a 30" screen. Current 30 inch displays are 2560x1600 for 16:10, or 2560x1440 for 16:9. You would be looking at 5760x3600 for a straight doubling up, and lets not forget what that does to the number of pixels - 1920x1080 is 2,073,600 pixels, but 5760x3600 is 20,736,000 - yes, exactly ten times the number, an order of magnitude greater. Try to drive that and even a few 7970's in CrossfireX or GTX 680's in SLI will run away and cry. There are probably many other considerations, these are just a few that spring to mind. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of higher res displays, its about time they improved, but it will take a lot of work to get there.
stuff doesn't look that bad with high dpi, and frankly with apple behind it, stuff will change. video doesn't matter, moving video on a small screen, the extra resolution is just extra, low bitrate 1080p web video isn't going to look different regardless, and its no big loss either way, the main benefit is in photo/text..aka 99% of what people spend time doing when computing. the more resolution you have left over the better scaling can work for gaming, you can run at lower resolutions without horrible blurring because there are enough pixels to scale effectively, so it isn't a huge issue, no one expects it to run games at the native resolution. anyways thats not really how you make your laptop purchase decision, else even 1080p displays would hinder gaming performance on most laptops.
You're writing as if Apple has been doing nothing in regard of HiDPI compatibility. Or that they haven't already handled the move to retina resolutions previously on two different product lines. You do know Apple have been adding HiDPI compatibility in for a while right? And you know how iOS handles 'standard' and retina resolutions? Standard OS controls such as windows, icons, buttons and anything displayed using core-text will be retina with zero work from the developers. Everything else (until apps are updated) will be pixel-doubled and therefore exactly the same as on legacy screens.
It won't... well kinda won't. If it did then OSX would assume it to be a non retina display and every control / text etc would be teeny tiny. It'll work the same as retina displays do on iOS, with in retina mode the screen measured in 'points'. An iPad 3 has a screen of 1024x768 points, the same as the previous two iPads. Each 1x1 point is rendered using 2x2 pixels. In code you can position any element on point, or half-point values. So an X coordinate of 10.5,10.5 is actually 21,21 pixels. This works wonderfully from a developers perspective, it's "kind of" how Microsoft used to do things with "twips" but better. The new MBP can also present it's screen as a 1920x1200 resolution display. I'd assume without retina. Hopefully those small 'retina' pixels mean running the panel at non-native resolution doesn't make it look pants.
Not true For those who are graced with displays >1080P just change the quality to original. While not common, it is also not hard to find a 4k video on youtube.
Fantastic! My Core2Duo 9600m GT era MBP is tired, broken, and just not cutting it. My only qualm is the storage. You start with 256gb, a reasonable amount for a single operating system, but I'd have to dual-boot Windows. That means 128gb per OS. If I want 512gb of storage, I have to spring for the next model up, which throws in a slightly more powerful processor that I don't want. What I'll probably do is get the base one, and boot Windows off an external Thunderbolt drive. My only other concern is the GT 650. There's no way it'll be managing high settings at 2880x1800. Fortunately, I can set my resolution to 1440x900 and it will look perfect. That's the beauty of a Retina display. You can halve the resolution of anything and it'll still look great. Also for those who missed it, they are offering 2 different 15" MacBook Pros. The Retina one and the old one. The old ones have been given Ivy Bridge, Kepler, and all the I/O of this one, as well as an Ethernet and FireWire port, while remaining in the same old body with mechanical hard drives and an optical drive, for significantly less money. Personally, I couldn't get the standard MacBook Pro, knowing the Retina one exists.
It's easy to for Apple (or anyone ) to release a high resolution 15" screen... but most people who aren't Appleholics will quickly realise that a 15" screen of that resolution is actually completely and utterly useless. Running everything at native res without scaling will result in text being so small it would be unreadable from normal laptop operating distances, so the OS will scale it larger... so in reality you'll have no more desktop real estate than you had on a "normal" resolution desktop... only difference is beautifully smooth edges to this upscaled content should be sit with the screen 5 inches from your face. These high res displays only become useful with much larger monitors, and even Apple aren't doing that due to cost. The high res desktop market is a few years off yet due to costs. The tech is there now, but it would come with a 4k price tag at least. Personally, I'd pay it, but I'm in a minority. So don't worry... Retina displays are a marketing gimmick at these small sizes, and just even more ridiculous at tablet and phone sized screens. You'd literally have to hold the device inches from your face to really appreciate where your money has gone. When 24" screens start to use these reslutions I'll sit up and listen.... or when 4K or higher hits 30" models.
I'm with Pook. I couldn't give less of a damn about resolution on laptops. 1440x900 or 1680x1050 is fine for a 15" screen. Apparently it's an IPS screen, which is definitely a step forward.
having "downgraded" from iPhone 4 "retina display" to iPhone 3GS "crappy old display" i can say there really isn't much difference. the main thing that makes iPhone 4 display brilliant isn't the amount of pixels, it's the IPS panel's colours. so i honestly don't buy this retina business. but what im interested to know is what equivalent resolution is the retina display is actually running at? if we go by iPhone/iPad 1:4 scaling, that would mean it's only running at 1440x900?
