It’s beautiful. It’s slim. It’s solid-state. It’s got a retina display. And there’s nothing I need more when I am developing on my laptop than a good screen.
Particularly, I need the best screen real estate I can get my hands on. That’s why, when I bought my 2010 15″ MacBook Pro, I paid an extra $100 for a screen that has a resolution of 1680 by 1050. It’s great. The only thing better would be more pixels. Right? Wrong.
The new retina display is 2880 by 1800. Here’s the catch: that’s less screen real estate. It’ll be crisper, but you can fit less on your screen. Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode, you’re seeing an equivalent 1440 by 900 resolution display, with 4x the “crispness.” That’s a downgrade in screen real estate, even if it is an upgrade in screen resolution.
Quite the conundrum: I would love that machine, but I cannot sacrifice the great real estate I get on my current screen, especially after being used to it for almost 2 years. This is an interesting problem.
Edit: Hit the comments for some links. Reports are that scaling on this screen isn’t nearly as ugly as it is on a standard display. While not a perfect solution, if the quality is good enough, that could certainly be the ticket to making this dream machine a part of my work life. Thanks for the comments!
14 Comments
perhaps there will be hacks to play around with that crispness level, so that you get 3x or 2x or whatever you want — you would be able to play with how much real estate you want!
agree with zach. and congrats on the strangely highly repped hackernews fame. posted from my 15inch high res mbp with 256 ssd and 750gb standard hd. that said, I sure could use the 16gb upgrade from 8 when loading up huge oracle vms.
Not necessarily true. Supported graphics apps will be able to use the “true” pixels so you’ll get more graphics on the screen. As far as text is concerned, you should be able to lower the font pitch because the will be rendered more smoothly. It should be better than an effective resolution of 1440 x 900.
@zach – due to the 2d nature of screen real estate, you can’t really do 3x or 2x without heavy amounts of aliasing or doing extra processing for anti-aliasing smudging. The shape of a pixel on the new macbook displays is a square. That means to zoom non-vector graphics WITHOUT tons of anti-aliasing graphical processing, you need to increase the zoom by 4x.
Nice point!
But i’m thinking if it’s retina display, you are able to reduce text a couple of sizes in your favorite editor and still maintain the same readability of your previously MacBookPro. Right?
At least there you can probably gain a couple of pixels :)
And I love my 17″ MBP 1920×1200 with anti-glare screen.
Fortunately, nothing from WWDC to make me jealous.
I understand retina for a phone, because you hold it 10cm away from your face, making image/text quality important. People are kidding themselves if they think they’ll notice a difference looking at a 4x pixel dense screen from half a meter away
If you don’t require Mac OS, other Hacker News commenters pointed out that ASUS has a new Zenbook Prime that does 1920×1080 in 13″: http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus_zenbook_prime_ux31a.aspx
I plan to try out both that and the MBP–I’d prefer Windows, to be honest, so the ASUS may get the nod for me. I suspect more and more “ultrabooks” will have this screen now that one manufacturer does. As a bonus, the ASUS is also smaller and cheaper than the MBP.
-Erica
Very good observation! But one merit gained in using a retina display for development is that we can now make our text smaller before the number of pixels we have to display it with become too few.
cool story bro
.. except it has 5 built in scaling options out of the box:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling
do some research next time
First of all, have we seen for sure that they won’t let you turn off “HiDPI” mode? Could be a moot point if they do.
Second, even using HiDPI mode, the only things that are “reduced resolution” are the menus and “chrome” of the apps. All of the content is capable of being displayed at “real pixel” resolution just by making it smaller. For example … regularly use 10pt font for programming? Use a 6pt font on the new system and get nearly the same “actual size” text.
I’ve used HiDPI mode on my Mac mini so that I can use it from across the room (with a 42″ screen) … and that’s the way I’ve used it.
It will be configurable:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling
@Zach – hop over to Crucial.com – I have 16GB in my Hi-Res MBP. Also have the SSD / Standard drive in it. Love it.
http://gyazo.com/dad1fb167537481ec0fcb39e8d3e6869
Another interesting observation: By the looks of it, “Scaled” as “More Space” renders a HiDPI screen (2x widget mode) as 3840×2400, which is scaled down to native 2880×1800. Taking a screenshot results in generating an image file of the original 3840×2400 rendered screen.
Cf. http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%204.36.07%20PM.png