Pixel Perfect
August 14, 2012 | ∞ John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, muses about the profound difference a retina display makes:
When I first started using the retina MacBook Pro, the whole thing felt fake, like I was using a demo version of Mac OS X ginned up in After Effects for shooting closeups of the screen for, say, an Apple commercial in which they didn’t want UI elements to look pixelated. Some degree of pixelation has always been part of my Mac experience.
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And as summer has worn on and I’ve used the retina MacBook Pro more and more, my impression has been pulled inside out. Now, only the retina MacBook Pro feels real to me, and all my other Macs feel ersatz. Low-resolution approximations of the ideal that now sits before my eyes.
I haven’t had the pleasure of using the new retina MacBook Pro but I do know that the jump from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 was so profound I went and bought a retina iPad the day they were available. Our lives have become so screen centric and pixel density is one spec that truly makes a difference in the overall experience of a device. Once you have seen text rendered without blur and images so vibrant and crisp that they pop it is impossible to be satisfied with less.
Reader Comments (2)
The drawback of the retina display is that it is too good. Many software manufacturers have very poor resolution products that inturn look exponentially worse on the retina display. Microsoft is the biggest culprit, as all of their programs look bad. Regardless I wouldn't trade my retina display for anything; I may, however, forgo Microsoft once and for all.
It is the unfortunate irony of retina displays that low resolution graphics actually look worse than on lesser screens. But it's just a transition period and soon good developers will update their graphics to take full advantage of the display. With my iPad it was a matter of mere weeks before most of my favorite apps had all been updated. Desktop apps will likely be slower and there is still a question of how to deal with web graphics.