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This change will not be dramatic like this. "Retina Display" is a "very high resolution display". It is not magical. It is not a fundamental technological shift. It is only Apple fanboyism that makes it seem that way. There have been "very high resolution displays" at the front edge of PC tech for decades, and the Internet has scaled slowly but surely to meet our current middle ground (probably approaching 1080p on desktops and something slightly lower on laptops this year). Most of the people here have been using "very high resolution displays" during most of the development of the web, designers in particular. PCs will, of course, reach the resolution of Apple's Retina Display; they'll have to in order to stay competitive. But, it'll happen gradually. Most people don't choose computers based on display resolution. I bought a new laptop a couple months ago, and went to Fry's (after buying online failed three times, and needing to get something quickly)...I bought the only 15" laptop they had with a 1080p display. Literally, it was the display model and they didn't have any others in stock. Consumers buy cheap or buy a brand name. But, educated consumers will keep pushing things forward, slowly but surely. So, yes, in three years, we'll mostly all be looking at "Retina Displays", but we'll just call them "displays". And we will have evolved the web slowly in that direction, just like we've been doing for decades. Proof: http://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.c... Note that on a modern display, these graphics are tiny, and the site itself only takes up about a 5th of the page (if that much). We've "gone Retina" maybe three or four times since 1997, we just didn't have Apple telling us that doubling display resolution was an epochal shift in computing technology and a legion of fans to carry forth the message. Final point: The shift from CRT to LCD was much more dramatic than this shift, and we all made it through. Scaremongering is pointless. |
(1920 * 1080) / (2880 * 1800) = 0.4 Your 1080p 15" display contains just 40% of the pixels of a single Retina 15" display. They even showed this in the demo. They edited a 1080p video in Final Cut at full resolution and there was plenty of room left for UI elements.
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Retina stuff isn't supposed to be remarkable just because the resolution is higher. It's remarkable because there are drastically more pixels in the same size screen.
The reason why folks are talking about this as if it's different is because cramming that many more pixels in the same amount of space requires some technology for it not to get all screwed up. It's not a modest jump from, say, 1024 to 1280, the progression you're describe. It's from 1920 to 2880. That's big. You might not like it because it came from Apple and Apple people like it but it does matter.