Retina Display in new iMacs & Macbooks

silvine

Rumour has it the new iMacs and Macbooks will feature retina display. What's do people here think about this possibility?

I can't imagine needing higher resolution or sitting inches away from my already oversized 27 iMac. I could, however, see some benefit in a retina display in a small Mac Air. I reckon this could put up the cost of the new machines too.


http://www.macrumors.com/2012/05/15/retina-displays-also-coming-to-next-generation-imac/

Sad Professor

I don't see the point TBH. Mac developers aren't going to rush to update their apps the way iOS developers did. And then there's the web. A Retina screen is just going to make everything look worse.

drunkmonkey

I've a matte screen, can't see what a retina display would do to my photo printing. Glossy was hard enough to judge, can only imagine shiny retina.

Sad Professor

Retina relates to the resolution of the screen, not how glossy it is. Photo editing is one area that would really benefit from it.

drunkmonkey

They'd hardly make a matte retina i'd say, or maybe, mmm. I won't be trading up for a good few years anyway. Will probably be a hologram screen by then.

Sad Professor

Sure they would. Higher resolution is higher resolution. How shiny the screen is makes no difference. They are already offering a matte option, they aren't going to take that away.

In fact, it would make sense to drop the glass altogether. It's only only adding weight to the MacBook and causes all kinds of problems with the iMac as well.

opinion guy

Surely doubling the screen resolution will eat battery life ?

I wouldn't want it at the cost of battery.

Sad Professor

Yeah, I'd be concerned about that as well, but they'll have more space for a bigger battery with the optical drive gone.

Colonel Panic

They would also need more powerful GPUs than the ones you get in Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge chipsets to drive higher resolution screens. Well, I say that knowing that the Intel HD3000 can drive 27" Apple displays, but there's a noticeable cost in graphics performance there.

So then you'd need a discrete GPU which would fight for some of the space the battery needs to drive said GPU and larger screen.

acous

Sad Professor wrote: »

I don't see the point TBH. Mac developers aren't going to rush to update their apps the way iOS developers did. And then there's the web. A Retina screen is just going to make everything look worse.

Have to take issue with this. It will make things look worse if they use smooth scaling on low-res elements, but I doubt they will. If they used retina screens and just pixel doubled everything, it would look nearly identical to what we have now. What will happen is text will be sharper, hidpi UI elements will be sharper and the rest will look like previous generation stuff. Maybe you meant that the mix of standard and hidpi will make it look worse as a whole, that might be true.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation really. If they don't push hidpi displays, the software will never get updated to support it. If they don't update the software, people won't see the point in going hidpi. I'm glad they're taking the initiative (assuming the rumours are true!).

Colonel Panic wrote:

They would also need more powerful GPUs than the ones you get in Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge chipsets to drive higher resolution screens. Well, I say that knowing that the Intel HD3000 can drive 27" Apple displays, but there's a noticeable cost in graphics performance there.

My 2006 MBP was well capable of driving 2560x1600 smoothly on its Radeon x1600. Ivy bridge graphics seems at least 5 times faster than that old Radeon, so I don't see GPU power being an issue anymore. Look how well the new ipad does at 2048x1536/60fps. Admittedly the UI is less complex, but there isn't a huge gulf there.

Colonel Panic

The new iPad manages that performance because it's got a quad core GPU.

acous

Colonel Panic wrote: »

The new iPad manages that performance because it's got a quad core GPU.

To get a rough idea of relative power, the SGX543 in the iPad has 4 cores running at 250mhz. Each core can do about 7.2 GFLOPS at 200mhz, so ~36 GFLOPS total.

Intel graphics 4000 has 16 "execution units". Each EU can run "up to" 35 GFLOPS. That's <560 total. Even a super conservative guess puts the intel graphics at 10 times the power of the iPad.

Edit: The main reason the iPad gets such good performance is the software. They can target the exact CPU/GPU and tweak everything to perfection. Kind of like how high end PCs don't get 10 times games the performance of consoles, despite having more than 10 times the horsepower.

aidan_walsh

The main reason the iPad gets such good performance is the software. They can target the exact CPU/GPU and tweak everything to perfection. Kind of like how high end PCs don't get 10 times games the performance of consoles, despite having more than 10 times the horsepower.

Every model of Mac gets its own specific build of OS X, so there is nothing to stop them doing that on desktop and notebook either.