[watmough]

Having queued for 7 hours yesterday to get my iPhone 4, I can confirm that the display actually exceeded my expectations.

All natively rendered text in controls, etc., looks like it was printed in a magazine.

This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook Pros.

[masklinn]

> This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook Pros.

Which is probably never. Those don't even reach the pixel density of the 2G/3G/3GS. 326ppi? That's already going to be pretty tall order on a 10" screen (the iPad currently stands at 132 ppi, assuming the form factor doesn't change we're talking about increasing the resolution by a factor of 2.5, pumping the resolution to an insane 2560x1920. We're talking about a resolution usually found on 30" computer screens here, and those things are still pretty much all between $1000 and $2000...).

The 13.3" macbook pro would have a 3712x2320 screen, the 15.4" would move up to 4200x2625 and the 17" would be sporting a 4000x3000 screen.

[whyenot]

30 years ago, you were lucky if you had a 300 bps acoustic modem. 20 years ago 9600 bps was considered state of the art. I am writing this while sitting in Peets in Los Altos where I have a 54,000,000 bps wireless connection, not to some local BBS, but to this much larger, almost unimaginably (at least it would have been to me in 1980!) complex structure, the internet.

In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image processing.

We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)

[matthavener]

Meanwhile, the xerox lisa had a DPI of 90, while a regular macbook has a DPI of 110.

http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/3.1.8_lisa.html http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html

[mayoff]

Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily. The OSes have some attempts at support for UI scaling, but none works well enough to run all of the popular software decently at 200dpi.

Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.

Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.

[WalterGR]

Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily.

I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.

If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?

[mayoff]

I mean that things just don't look or act right. Try firing up Quartz Debug (if you have a Mac), setting the UI Resolution scale factor to 2, and restarting some apps. Every app I checked has problems.

For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly. Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly. The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons. Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale factor.

Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.

World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login screen on the other three quarters.

Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior defects.

[whyenot]

The Apple Lisa also had a keyboard with 77 keys while a regular MacBook keyboard has 78 keys.

Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.

[abstractbill]

Yes, but the Lisa cost about $22,000 (adjusted for inflation). A regular macbook costs $1000.

[palish]

Just curious, how did you do the inflation adjustment?

[pbhjpbhj]

I'd guess using something like http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=inflation+rate+in+US+fr... to establish a mean rate and then using "compound interest" formula?

[white_eskimo]

There clearly is lots of innovation going on, but 54 Mbps wireless hardware was introduced over 11 years ago!

Furthermore, AT&T's DSL speed has only exhibited a .15 Mbps CAGR over the past 5 years to its current peak of 6 Mbps. Comcast's average cable internet speeds were 6 Mbps from 2005 to 2007, until they jumped to 12 Mbps in 2008.

Can't wait for the future...

Sources: "IEEE 802.11a-1999." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11a-1999>.\n "AT&T Residential Broadband Internet." <http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=6431>.\n "Evolution of Broadband speed and prices over time." <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/31/41551958.xls>.

[gojomo]

Never is a mighty long time!

Both handhelds and desktops have been increasing in resolution, and decreasing in cost, for years. There's no reason for that trend to stop until all displays reach 'retinal indifference' at their usual viewing distance. I would not be surprised to see 4000x3000 LCDs in laptops in the next decade.

[masklinn]

> Both handhelds and desktops have been increasing in resolution, and decreasing in cost, for years.

That's not entirely correct. 24" at 1920x1200 and 30" at 2560x1600 is something that's been there for years, and these days laptops are regressing rather than progressing: in 2005 I had colleagues with 15" laptops in 1920x1200, these days the majority seems to be 16/9 screens in stupid resolutions (1366x768 seems really common these days in entry-level laptops)

> Never is a mighty long time!

My never stands for the Macbooks, and probably the iPad as well. By the time we reach the ability to create such densities with acceptable yields on panes bigger than 10 inches, the current names will long have been retired.

[Retric]

Company's rarely change the name of a well liked product. Consider a 1976 Honda accord vs a 2010 Honda accord. They are vary different cars targeting different markets but as long as people think product X = quality the name tends to stick around.

(1976 68hp ) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/1977-1982...

(2010 177-hp to 271-hp on a v6) http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-sedan/exterior.aspx

[philwelch]

On the other hand, consider PowerBook--a strong brand since the early 90's that was still phased out.

[pohl]

Having been named after the PowerPC architecture probably accounts for that one.

[nooneelse]

You wouldn't need anything like 4000x3000 for 'retinal indifference' using the article's number of 287ppi@12" use distance as a basis for that threshold. 4000x3000 pixels, assuming a 22" screen is about 227ppi. The threshold in the article, translated to a typical working distance for a laptop of 22" is about 156ppi. So a 22" diagonal screen (same aspect ratio as your 4kx3k) would only need 1850 pixels on the short side to hit the 'retinal indifference' number.

Oh, and some other smartphones crossed into retinal indifference at their typical use distance sometime late last year.

[yan]

As far as computer-related predictions go that start with 'never', I'd love to save this and refer you to it in 1, 3 or 5 years.

[gthank]

I agree with you, but I'm still sad that I don't get a 300dpi screen.

[sambeau]

I can't imagine that Apple would have gone to the trouble of giving this kind of display a name & logo if they were only intending to use it on one product.

[bmalicoat]

It doesn't have to be 326ppi to be huge news. You probably hold the iPad another 12 inches further away from your eyes than the iPhone, so a smaller, more manageable bump in ppi could mean the same 'retina' result.

[grinich]

People not that long ago believed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible.

Never is a very long time. Is it really impossible that large high-DPI screens will exist in 5-10 years?

[masklinn]

> Never is a very long time. Is it really impossible that large high-DPI screens will exist in 5-10 years?

I'm not quite saying that.

I'm saying the birth of those screens is so far away the current brands will very likely have been replaced a long time ago. Those densities on > 10"displays are pie in the sky dreams right now.

[elai]

I've heard the cost in lcds is far more about the size of the display vs the resolution. Ive seen replacement lcds for projectors, very small lcds with very high resolutions for faily cheap prices.

[amichail]

What is the resolution for touch sensitivity in the iPhone 4?

[cpr]

Smaller than you could ever experience with your finger (about a 90-pixel square area on the iPhone 4), and better than any other phones on the market, apparently.

[qwzybug]

Not quite. Apple's HIG recommends allotting 44pts for hit targets (about 90px on the new screen) for usability's sake, but you can hit much smaller targets if you're careful about it.

[cpr]

Right, I just meant your finger tip covered about that much.

You can hit smaller targets, but not easily.

[hboon]

176 pixels, rather than 90.