[michael_miller]

I think this is a bigger question of backwards compatibility. Surely Apple could find a technical solution to downloading Retina assets to non-Retina devices, but at the end of the day, what does this accomplish? It means that users of older devices will have a slightly better experience, at the expense of a nontrivial amount of work. Were such a scheme to be implemented, the developer would likely have to mark Retina files manually and Apple would have to add infrastructure on their servers. All this for something that will be pointless in the near future when Apple stops selling non-Retina iOS devices.

I don't mean to assert that Apple shouldn't attempt to separate out Retina assets, but I think it's worth considering the opportunity cost. There are a lot of other things Apple's engineers could be working on. Should this be their top priority?

[chipsy]

This is the company that simply yanked out floppy drives when they decided they were no longer necessary, so it's probably not a priority at all. It doesn't directly cause breakage, and a few years down the line, Retina will be everywhere.

[mcguire]

In other words, last month's devices are legacy.

[w1ntermute]

Funny how that's a big problem when talking about Android devices, but with Apple it's magically a non-issue.

[prof_hobart]

Probably because the vast majority of apps still run fine on the legacy devices. My wife has a 3GS (almost 3 years old now), and apart from Siri and a tiny amount of high-end games, it does everything my 4S does - if a little slower, and slightly less crisply. They both have the latest OS version, and every app I have on my phone runs acceptably on hers.

Can Android say the same thing?

I agree that it's a bit of a pain having to have both the low res and high res graphics bundled in a single app version, but this issue isn't one of legacy - it's the same on a 2 year old iPad 1 as it is on a brand new iPad 3. If you've only got 16GB on it, you're possibly going to run into space issues with these new larger apps.

[rimantas]

No, these are completely different problems. First of all statement about last month's device being legacy is false. iPhone 3GS was almost three years ago and still supports the latest version of iOS. This is the problem for Android—just compare adoption rate and share for the lastest versions of Android. Even some new Android devices just about to be realased don't support ICS.

[kenrikm]

Retina graphics are already marked @2x. They could have implemented split bundles however Apple has never been one to maintain complete backwards compatibility. And I do agree Garage Band is obese, same as the OSX version which I had to uninstall from my MacBook Air because it took up way to much of the very limited SSD space.

[high5ths]

I don't think we're talking about a "slightly better experience" -- this is the difference between having 20 apps and 40 apps (for example). Space is at a premium on these devices...

[Steko]

I have something like 400 apps. They total around 20 gb with the median app being 20 mb. This is more like the difference between 95 and 100 apps. If having a lot of app storage is your deal breaker presumably you didn't buy the device with the least storage making it a small issue.