Apple kills it with new iPad lineup

seems like the solution to the picture problem has been figured out
http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2012/...aphy_on_retina (via daring fireball but the permalink isnt working for some reason)

it's gonna take ages though as absolutely nobody is using this right now, and despite dominating the tablet market, the share of iPads in most browser statistics isn't that high so it's probably not the first priority for most devs.


the current uselessness of the retina display is probably going to keep me from upgrading. LTE is worthless to me as we don't have it yet in europe (my 3g is capped at 3mbps, but at least i get 9GB a month for €9)

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

seems like the solution to the picture problem has been figured out
http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2012/...aphy_on_retina (via daring fireball but the permalink isnt working for some reason)

it's gonna take ages though as absolutely nobody is using this right now, and despite dominating the tablet market, the share of iPads in most browser statistics isn't that high so it's probably not the first priority for most devs.


the current uselessness of the retina display is probably going to keep me from upgrading. LTE is worthless to me as we don't have it yet in europe (my 3g is capped at 3mbps, but at least i get 9GB a month for €9)

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I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at here. There's a 900px image and an onclick JS script that loads a 1800px image? I'm not really clear what this has to do with progressive JPEG?

Oh, NOW I get it. I didn't even realize there was a limit on the size of an image the iPad could render. LOL. That just makes things worse. So the third constraint is if you want to do full screen Retina images you must use Progressive JPG, everything else will fail to render. Low resolution image? Looks like crap. Super high resolution image? Looks like crap. Nice.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at here. There's a 900px image and an onclick JS script that loads a 1800px image? I'm not really clear what this has to do with progressive JPEG?

Oh, NOW I get it. I didn't even realize there was a limit on the size of an image the iPad could render. LOL. That just makes things worse. So the third constraint is if you want to do full screen Retina images you must use Progressive JPG, everything else will fail to render. Low resolution image? Looks like crap. Super high resolution image? Looks like crap. Nice.

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What a complete mess. I doubt the average Apple user will even notice.

Found an article about how Apple is doing iPad Retina magic on Apple.com:
http://cloudfour.com/how-apple-com-w...-to-new-ipads/

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What they’ve chose to do is load the regular images for the site and then if the device requesting the page is a new iPad with the retina display, they use javascript to replace the image with a high-res version of it.

The heavy lifting for the image replacement is being done by image_replacer.js. Jim Newberry prettified the code and placed it in a gist for easier reading.

The code works similarly to responsive images in that data attributes are added to the markup to indicate what images should be replaced with high-res versions.

Unlike most of the solutions I reviewed last summer, Apple is applying the data-hires attribute to the parent container instead of to the images to themselves. Also, the images borrow from native iOS development and have consistent sizes. So the high-res version of ‘ipad_title.png’ can be found at ‘ipad_title_2x.png’.

As far as I can tell, there is no attempt to prevent duplicate downloads of images. New iPad users are going to download both a full desktop size image and a retina version as well.

The price for both images is fairly steep. For example, the iPad hero image on the home page is 110.71K at standard resolution. The retina version is 351.74K. The new iPad will download both for a payload of 462.45K for the hero image alone.

The total size of the page goes from 502.90K to 2.13MB when the retina versions of images are downloaded.

Another interesting part of image_replacer.js is that it checks for the existence of 2x images before downloading them.

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came here to post that. pages taking 4x as much to download is going to suck for those of us on data caps (for example i just moved into a new apartment and the ISP said it's going to take at least 2 months to get me hooked up, until then I have 9GB of 3G a month), but i guess that's what you get when you quadruple image resolution.

That being said it's about time someone did this. It might be a bit clumsy at first and it's very unlike Apple to be the clumsy early adopter, but it's kind of obvious that retina-like screens and websites developed for them are the future so might as well go for it now.

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

came here to post that. pages taking 4x as much to download is going to suck for those of us on data caps (for example i just moved into a new apartment and the ISP said it's going to take at least 2 months to get me hooked up, until then I have 9GB of 3G a month), but i guess that's what you get when you quadruple image resolution.

That being said it's about time someone did this. It might be a bit clumsy at first and it's very unlike Apple to be the clumsy early adopter, but it's kind of obvious that retina-like screens and websites developed for them are the future so might as well go for it now.

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It's clumsy on the developer side. The user side is pretty seamless. It just seems like a lot of sites aren't good enough for your fancy new display.

The data caps will definitely make this suck, and it's really going to make even LTE look slow unless you've got a really solid connection.

The data caps are already way to low. 5GB? That's like 3 or 4 hours of HD content at 1080P.

Just when the internet is snappy, they increase the size of websites 4x. I doubt we will see "retina" displays on PCs anytime soon. 22" 120hz monitors still cost 300+ dollars. I can't imagine how much a 260+ DPI 22" monitor would cost.

Doing a back of the envelope calculation, a 22" 260 DPI monitor would have a resolution of ~4986x2804 in 16:9. Say goodbye to gaming.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

Just when the internet is snappy, they increase the size of websites 4x. I doubt we will see "retina" displays on PCs anytime soon. 22" 120hz monitors still cost 300+ dollars. I can't imagine how much a 260+ DPI 22" monitor would cost.

Doing a back of the envelope calculation, a 22" 260 DPI monitor would have a resolution of ~4986x2804 in 16:9. Say goodbye to gaming.

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It looks like Apple will be rolling out high resolution display on all MacBook Pros this summer. The dev previews of the next OS have 2X assets.

I have a feeling we might see something like this:
27" 3840x2160
17" 2560x1440
15" 1920x1080
13" 1680x1050 or stay with the 1440x900 of the MB Air (which is pretty close to retina already), but use new 1.3X assets in effect decreasing screen real estate

This will mess things up even more because the multiplier will no longer be 2X. Instead it's going to become completely arbitrary. Anywhere from 1.3X to 2X. Which means that resolution alone will no longer be a way to measure screen real estate at all. So we'll move to SVG for all graphics and icons (which is fine), and then we'll have to waste buckets of bandwidth serving up 2X photos which may only end up showing 30% more pixels. So a 30% increase in resolution at a 100% increase in cost.

Unless, of course, we add some kind of PPI parameter to initial server calls.

I think it is pretty ridiculous to go down this path for general purposes. The marginal increase in IQ is not worth the 4x increase in bandwidth, 4x GPU power, and large increase in price. 88-96 DPI is perfectly fine for general use. The only people I could see "needing" the higher DPI displays are people in the media creation industry. A high PPI is needed for tablets, but I think it will be lost on laptop owners.

My Dell 2005fpw is a 94 PPI screen. I about 2' 8" away from the monitor. There is no way that I can tell individual pixels. During my last eye exam I had better than 20/20 vision.

I'm sure they do look better when seen in person, but I'm not so sure it is worth the price.

Are Apple displays even 120hz? I'd think that would be the first step instead of increasing the resolution. 120hz makes a computer feel much faster, even just moving a window around feels so different and better.

I have a suspicion that instead of just going 2x on each current device, they may just standardize OSX resolution. 2560x1600/1440 maybe.

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

I have a suspicion that instead of just going 2x on each current device, they may just standardize OSX resolution. 2560x1600/1440 maybe.

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Possible I guess. But then what about different size displays? Just float the whole UI and let people do whatever?

It would give devs more precise control over how full screen apps look at the expense of some other complications. I've always felt that 2560x1440 on a 27" screen is perfectly fine whereas 1280x720/800 on a 13" screen is lacking, despite the fact that the pixel density is about the same.

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

It would give devs more precise control over how full screen apps look at the expense of some other complications. I've always felt that 2560x1440 on a 27" screen is perfectly fine whereas 1280x720/800 on a 13" screen is lacking, despite the fact that the pixel density is about the same.

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Totally because of the viewing distance. You can't physically sit only 1-2ft away from a 27" screen because you would be constantly moving your head to view the entire area. I literally put my iPad less than 1ft away when reading. So I need a DPI of at least 2x that of a normal desktop monitor on a tablet to get the same experience.

In realty, what you recommend (a constant resolution) is the perfect choice because then DPI/PPI scales up as the screen size scales down. Finding the right resolution that scales well shouldn't be too hard to match to average human behavior (moving a smaller screen closer to one's face.) It will have upper and lower boundaries of course, but we aren't talking about iPhone sized screens or projectors.

One argument against it is that it would mean Apple needs a separate screen fabrication setup for each screen size (you can produce different screen sizes on the same equipment, but not different PPIs), but then again at the volume of product that Apple ships out it may be perfectly reasonable to have a handful of different screen technologies - even now some of their laptops have multiple manufacturers for the "same" screen to meet demand.

It's fairly inevitable that laptops will see retina screens in the near future. PC performance is at a point where for all but "Truck" usage any standard system is adequate so manufacturers need other things to entice customers. At this point in time the only improvements I would care about in my current machine (13" Air) are a 512GB SSD (certainly coming within a year or two), even better battery life (I'm sure it will marginally increase over time as other parts of the machine become more efficient but I'm not sure a radical increase is possible with current battery technology), and of course a better screen.

Large screens (24-30") on the other hand are pretty stagnant and I don't think enough people care about increased resolution on them to make it worth thinking about at this point. Apple are better off improving IPS production techniques to knock a couple hundred dollars off the large screens they already have.

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Originally Posted by Steven P Jobs

One argument against it is that it would mean Apple needs a separate screen fabrication setup for each screen size (you can produce different screen sizes on the same equipment, but not different PPIs), but then again at the volume of product that Apple ships out it may be perfectly reasonable to have a handful of different screen technologies - even now some of their laptops have multiple manufacturers for the "same" screen to meet demand.

It's fairly inevitable that laptops will see retina screens in the near future. PC performance is at a point where for all but "Truck" usage any standard system is adequate so manufacturers need other things to entice customers. At this point in time the only improvements I would care about in my current machine (13" Air) are a 512GB SSD (certainly coming within a year or two), even better battery life (I'm sure it will marginally increase over time as other parts of the machine become more efficient but I'm not sure a radical increase is possible with current battery technology), and of course a better screen.

Large screens (24-30") on the other hand are pretty stagnant and I don't think enough people care about increased resolution on them to make it worth thinking about at this point. Apple are better off improving IPS production techniques to knock a couple hundred dollars off the large screens they already have.

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The added resolution in a 27"-30" would be quite useful for video above 1080p.