Apple rumored to launch 2880x1800 Retina Display MacBook Pro in Q2 2012 - Page 2

What you smokin'?
Of course processor power is still an incentive to buy a new machine. Upgrading from a 2.0GHz i7 to a 2.2GHz is, of course, pointless as you so rightly stated. But saying it is not an incentive at all is just untrue. If I buy a new computer several years later, I'll want it to have a more powerful CPU and one that is of good value when compared to the competition.

Let's say that there is a shortage of high resolution displays (which there almost certainly will be at first). Would it make more sense for Apple to use the limited screens to produce $2-3,000 laptops or $499 iPads?

And if there's a shortage, it's going to be easier to produce 6 M laptops than 40 M iPads.

Plus, of course, there's the fact that the laptop has greater graphics capability and better batteries.

Everything suggests that this type of screen would first be used in the MacBook Pro and the iPad later (unless there's a major problem with the screen like color accuracy).


Not a problem. By then, Ivy Bridge will be able to handle it even with onboard graphics. As long as you're not playing the latest action games, graphics won't be a problem.


That's certainly true.


First, you could always do pixel doubling. Let's say the resolution is 4,000 x 2400. If you double the pixels, you'd have a screen which would effectively be 2,000 x 1200. Or triple and get 1333 x 800. You wouldn't get the distortions that you normally see when running at reduced resolution.

I was noting the iPad in my post. 2048x1536 4:3 9.7" display is 264ppi.

Agreed, but those resolutions are often not available as choices in the game.

My 1680*1050 would be 840*525... I have never seen that offered in a Mac version of a game and I don't even know if that resolution is supported by the drivers nVidia/ATI supplies.

So even with a relatively powerful MacBook Pro, I have to run things like Dragon Age at 800*600, which looks awful, or suffer a stutter-fest at native resolution. Newer games suffer even more. With Mafia II, the drop to 1440*900 improves things immensely frame rate wise from native (it's only 75% of the pixels) but it looks pretty bad visually.

I only smoke the highest quality weed, and I consider myself to be a true connoisseur of cannabis.

Of course when somebody goes to buy a new machine, they're going to want to get the most power that they can for the amount of money that they're spending, but that's not exactly what I meant.

For example, I'm currently typing on a 2007 MacBook (not even a pro), and it still performs just fine for everyday tasks like surfing the web, checking emails, watching netflix etc. I have more powerful desktop machines, but a new MacBookPro would have to be pretty damn enticing, if I were to consider getting a new one, as the one I have now is more than powerful enough for me, so a better CPU is not a good enough incentive. If for example, it were to come with some new feature, like a super Hi-Res display, then that would certainly get me excited and would make me want to get out my credit card.

Ludicrous is exactly the word I would use for a high-end laptop with a screen with a 5º acceptable viewing angle. Oh yes, the optical drive it shipped with wouldn't read multi-layer discs - that at least was fixed under warranty - but it still has the problem of the breathe on it and it ejects earphone socket with noisy output. Neither of those are fixable under warranty because they were basic design flaws.

Oh yes, there was the lack of a firewire socket fixed in the next model refresh

My previous Powerbook Ti had a much superior - dead silent headphone socket which wouldn't spit the plug out whenever it felt like it.

I really wish I had returned it as not-fit-for-purpose but the Powerbook GPU had decided to separate itself from the MB so I had little choice at the time other than to go Wintel.

One of those mornings, ignore me

You're moved from ludicrous to asinine.

I just use an Apple LCD Cinema Display along with my MBP i7 when at my desk, no sacrifice portability when you have it all with the second screen.

I'm still of the belief that this is all an elaborate joke.

Because I can't even fathom how inhumanly [SOMETHING] you'd have to be to actually believe that what you're saying is the truth.

Apple ][ had specified "for most people" and he's right. Most people are just doing email, browsing the web, writing an occasional paper, watching youtube or Netflix, etc. A computer from 5 years ago can handle all of that. From a processing power perspective, current systems would let them have more things open at once, do the multimedia things more smoothly etc. A new processor and gpu alone won't add too much more.

This does not take into account gamers or professional users or even pro-sumers. They will always want more and faster. The bar just keeps raising. The $800 Mac Mini runs World of Warcraft w/everything on High (one step below Ultra) on a 1680x1050 screen. That level of performance is rather easily achieved and for even cheaper in mid-tower PCs. So like Apple ][ was saying, if what you need to do is already acceptably good, what does the new model really bring to them?

If they want something more graphically or computationally intense to speed up their work, that new better display, higher RAM capacity, Thunderbolt ports etc, the update will be worth their while. If they are just looking to browse the web and play some Facebook games, they likely already have what they need in their current system.

Likely we will see Retina Display iMacs and displays not long after the MBPs are updated. Talk about obsoleting the past !

Amoled has far better contrast, response time, colour gamut, lower power consumption and vastly superior viewing angle than the POS Apple put in my 13" unibody/Pro. The pixel density of my Samsung phone with AMOLED screen is 283 ppi and I can view it from any angle within 180º The ppi of the 'top quality' screen in my unibody - 113

Please don't spout the anti-pentile nonsense, because perceptually, at normal viewing distances, they deliver the results.

If you are going to put a reflective screen in a laptop, at least give it a usable viewing angle.

There was a trinitron in my Mac Se was there? Now put away the ra-ra chants and the pom-poms and save them for the brainwashed.

Would you like me to take and post some comparative photos showing how rank the viewing angle of my glorious Apple screen is?

@ cnocbui

You need to learn to note that you're being sarcastic or we'll think you really are that daft.

Are you kidding? Super AMOLED? Talk about ugly! Man (woman), you've got absolutely no taste or sensibility. Super AMOLED has got to be about the worst picture quality since TFT. And even that's arguable.

Super AMOLED = awful color accuracy, blown out color, higher power consumption than LCD at high brightness levels (used for reading, typical web browsing, etc.), and reduced visibility in sunlight. Yes, there's also the pentile (non Plus) displays, which can look terrible.

5120x2880 on a 27" TB display would be 217.57 PPI. That might be enough for a standard distance desktop monitor to be Retina. Not sure of that formula.

You need to understand that Apple makes both the software and the hardware, so they are optimized for each other.

Resolution independence sounds grand, but Apple knows every size of monitor it makes, and OSX is optimized for them.

Only if you want to jerry rig some sort of off-resolution POS to a Mac does resolution independence become important. That is a Windows thing.

Apple designs its software for Apple hardware. That is why it all just works. Perfectly. Every time.

Hope this is true. I wonder if they will increase the capacity and bandwidth of the video memory as well to match the higher resolutions.

You'd have to run games at interlaced resolutions of course, but for everything else this would be awesome, assuming the graphics hardware (especially the integrated ones) could make it smooth.

Re: people worrying about tiny elements and lack of resolution independence, that's the point of going exactly 4x, the scaling is much simpler.

Nerdgasm, that's all I gotta say.

No joke. Which of the faults I have mentioned do you believe I am making up or mis-representing? They are all well documented. Or is your lack of belief based in a misapprehension that Apple couldn't possibly ever sell lemons. Perhaps you think that my expectations shouldn't be so high for a device costing so much.



Al right, I'll admit it, I do tend to shoot Velvia Pro.

The bit about poorer visibility in sunlight is wrong, as shown by multiple comparative videos on youtube and comparative review articles. The lack of colour accuracy is pertinent for phone implementations, but given a laptop screen where, contrast, colour balance and saturation would be controllable, it wouldn't hold. The colour gamut of AMOLED is far superior to the TN LCD in my Macbook Pro, the clour accuracy of which is poor.

I think the poster indicating that AMOLED is amazing is absolutely correct. AMOLED is a vastly superior technology.:roll eyes: After all, when the display if life-critical AMOLED is considered the standard. Oh, wait. For diagnostic purposes in medical imaging we use > $10,000 USD 4 MP+ TFT AM Color LCD Dual Domain IPS-Pro monitors.

They already "got real" with it. As of Lion, Apple dropped their old vector-based resolution independence implementation in favour of the bitmap-based approach in iOS. Mac apps can now contain double-res images for use on double-res (retina) displays.

I expect no app developers have bothered to implement it yet because no devices support it, but it's there in the OS, and apps that just use standard widgets, vector drawing and text should get the benefits automatically when run on a retina Mac.

This is a real issue but Lion has been extensively reworked to be resolution independent. We should get sharper text not smaller.

3438 ÷ 217.57ppi = 15.80" from eyes with 20/20 vision.

Lion effective is drawing vectors now in real world dimensions not pixels. Effectively this makes vector operations in Lion resolution independent. This was not the case before Lion.

AMOLED visibility is poorer than LCD in bright sunlight. The difference is smaller today with the best AMOLED displays, but still real. The comparison videos are typically shot at an angle to the displays, which exacerbates the problem with LCD. If you can't see the camera reflected in the display, then the video probably wasn't shot head-on.

The color accuracy of the LCD in your MBP is far superior to what you'll find in any AMOLED smart phone. The cost to mass produce AMOLED displays of 11" or larger is simply prohibitive. Recall the Sony XEL-1 11" television was not even 720p and cost $2500.

The genius of Steve Jobs was not only his taste but his sensibility of when the market was ripe for a technology.

IOS is resolution independent, the so called 2x mode is foe bitmaps where bit maps are used. Vector drawing and even font drawing is resolution independent. This is why text and other graphics drawn on iOS device screens looks so much sharper. A font for example might have twice as many pixels defining its image.

Computer display resolution has stagnated because the UI is still pixel based. Regardless of the display resolution the same number of physical dots are used to draw each element. So what was once the size of a post it note on your screen is now the size of a postage stamp (not that the current generation even knows what that is). It's much sharper, but it's proportionally smaller at the same time. That's no improvement. For many, in fact, it's worse because some text has gotten so small it can no longer be read without magnification.

The "retina" display on the iPhone changed things by mandating the use of graphics with 4x as many dots as before so elements appear the same size on both retina and non-retina displays. That means app developers have to create two versions of everything and include both in the app bundle increasing its size. Luckily downsampling images to half their original dimensions is easy, but it's still work that has to be done. Ensuring downloaded content is available in multiple sizes to support the variety of devices out there requires greater effort. Some simply refuse to do it and instead have the device do the scaling. Inevitably those apps perform poorly because the phone is doing much of the work and the resulting images can show artifacts of the scaling process. Unless your phone has exactly the same resolution as the developer's and all downloaded content is similarly designed specifically for your phone, elements in the app are being scaled on your phone and that just isn't going to look as good or perform as well as it could.

That's one of the hurdles faced by Android. In the last 15 months Android devices have shipped in 13 different screen resolutions from 240x320 up to 800x1280. To make matters worse there are 6 different screen shapes ranging from 4:3 (1.33) to 16:9 (1.778).

It's impractical to include 13 different sets of graphics and UI layouts in your app so elements get stretched, shrunk, cropped and shifted around when you move from one device to the next. The idea of a perfect match between graphic design and finished product is impossible.

Despite having designed the Dock, an affront to all that's good in this world, a UI element that changes size, shape and layout when an item is added or removed and on mouse-over if the hideous magnify feature is turned on, I think Apple will try to avoid the Android issue when moving to higher resolution computer displays.

I also believe they'll wait until they have a stable system wide scaling system in place to double the point size of text on the high res displays the way text on the iPhone 4 is exactly the same size as on the iPhone 3. The current Mac lineup has a variety of different pixel densities, but they're all within a fairly narrow range making the physical size of the word File on one Mac is roughly the same as it is on all other contemporary Macs.

Application developers with their own rendering engines will have to adapt.

First off, just because Apple offers a higher rez screen on the MBP 15" does not mean they will offer one on the 13" or 17". A certain level of production would be needed to make any new display feasible. Ramping up production on 3 new hi-rez screens would not be cheap and the margins could be low.

A 17" hi-rez would attract the professional graphics/photography/video market but I am not sure Apple would offer that right away. They might wait to gauge the reaction and support issues generated by offering a 15" with a hi-rez screen. And it would probably only be an optional upgrade. Normal rez screens will probably still be available.

Also, more graphics power will be required to handle the greater number of pixels, so I doubt the GPU built-in to the new Intel chips would be able to handle that and give performance close to what a 15" MBP has now.

I could see a MacBook Pro 13" with a screen resolution the same as now, but with no additional GPU chip, using only the Intel built-in GPU. This would help keep costs down and margins up. If you want more pixels you will have to move up to the 15", or 17" if it is offered.

Also this would give Apple an opening for a 15" MBA. It would have normal rez screen and use the built-in Intel graphics but no additional GPU chip to keep power, heat, and space requirements down.

Remember without actual screens to test your technology on you really don't have a product. Especially if there is nothing to ship to consumers.

As to resolution independence it is very nuch in Lion right now. All drawing is now done in real world coordinates. Further the code is set up to take arbitrary multipliers.

The 2X pixel increases that everyone fixates on is all about bitmaps. People fail to realize that bitmaps are still part of software development, a 2x increase in resolution means developers can minimize efforts required to produce those bitmaps. However vector and font drawing has little to do with the need to simplify bit map handling.

The reality is arbitrary scalability is there in Lion, for vector operations. The support of 2X bitmaps is there to solve other issues. I'm just shocked at the mis information that is flowing through this thread. The 2x bitmaps are there because scaling bitmaps sucks and at times just looks ugly.

You're too concerned with what is largely marketing here. An ipad doesn't really function as a direct replacement to a macbook pro, and it uses a significantly smaller display. The costs do go up significantly doing this on larger displays, but I really wouldn't expect to see it greatly impact the sale of Macs. The ipad doesn't function well as a sole standalone machine. Until that changes, pretty pixels mean very little.


You guys are way too obsessed with this. Larger displays have been lagging behind with relatively stagnant growth and that it's significantly more difficult to implement such a solution in a larger display with the increased error chances in manufacturing. Articles on the tech sites suggest 2016 or so for higher resolution desktop displays. 15" laptops have been sporting the typical resolution of a 24" display panel for some time now.

It's probably a matter of when panel manufacturers are actually able to make these things cost effectively.


This just reflects what I've mentioned in previous. Displays aren't fully defined by their panel technology. Display manufacturers take what is available and design something that will perform up to spec.

Not always. Some hospitals are now using iPads for medical imaging.

I guess that supports your point even further.

You need to understand that Apple makes both the software and the hardware, so they are optimized for each other.

Resolution independence sounds grand, but Apple knows every size of monitor it makes, and OSX is optimized for them.

Only if you want to jerry rig some sort of off-resolution POS to a Mac does resolution independence become important. That is a Windows thing.

Apple designs its software for Apple hardware. That is why it all just works. Perfectly. Every time.

To say you're "shocked at the ignorance here" is a bit much - I suspect most people who've commented on 2x mode do actually understand it, but it's difficult to explain accurately and completely to non-developers.

Technically, drawing on Mac OS now supports true resolution independence, but it doesn't work the same way as the old implementation, and it doesn't do all drawing using vectors, which is what a lot of people would assume resolution independence would require.

All existing vector drawing, such as core graphics, OpenGL and text is now resolution independent, but to be honest that's not much of an achievement since they were all vector-based to begin with. What's new in Lion is support for automatic loading and display of @2x bitmaps, allowing resolution independence for non-vector-based drawing (which is still what most apps use for user interface widgets, including Apple's apps) with minimal effort for developers.

And if iOS is anything to go by, I think it's unlikely that Apple will support this feature for anything other than 2x resolution (i.e. one virtual pixel mapping to four real pixels) because the the bitmap scaling won't look great for any other scale (although any scale factor is technically supported, including non-integer scale factors).

I agree completely. If Apple does this, the MBP will be VERY nice indeed.

If they eliminate the DVD drive, there will be plenty of room to increase battery size. Likely, they can do that and decrease the overall size and bulk of the machine too.

Not really. I knew the formula to figure out PPI, but wasn't sure what the formula was for Retina, so I posted what the current TB Display resolution increased similarly would be. Notice I had been answering someone who was claiming iMacs and the displays would be getting replaced w/these hi-res monitors shortly after laptop ones were. Really just curiosity honestly.

Which laptops are popular for Hackintosh conversions?

Ummm....no. The 13 inch display will display those elements that work well on a 13 inch display. Judt like it does now.

But they will each be crisper. That is all.

Any recent Cannabis Cup winners that you count among your favorites?