Today, I am a geek (not really a designer) and 2 out of 3 of my devices have retina displays already (iPhone and iPad). Within much less than 3 years, all my devices will. Within 3 years, there will be no Apple device being sold that doesn't have a Retina display. Will other vendors follow suit? If they don't, they'll be left in the dust, so I imagine they will have to, if they can.
It's usually a good idea to skate where the puck is going, rather than where it is now. In 3 years, the puck will be retina. My Macbook Air is not Retina, so I can't be arsed to design for Retina... yet. Once my Mac has a Retina display, I will design for Retina, and let the lower-res experience be inferior. By then, most of the people who care about such things will have Retina displays anyway.
No, it's a gimmick designed expressly to confuse the consumer. Other manufacturers of comparable products, for trademark reasons, can't use the term "retina". So only Apple has "retina".
Intel played a similar trick about 8 years ago with "Centrino". The advertising (for what was essentially just a 802.11b chipset with some added processor/chipset requirements) was so successful that many novice users got fooled into thnking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
I believe folks have already seen evidence in OSX that Apple will be doing "retina" displays for laptops and desktops. Continued movement towards a resolution-independent OS.
I haven't used it yet, but I understand that perfect retina rendering (as in something they would advertise as a feature) is pencilled in for the release after this.
Hello. I'm super late to this party, it looks like. I only have one question: will my retina display (on a MacBook Pro) do all the right things, just as it does under MacOS and MacOS programs?
Apple announced the 2880x1800 Retina display in June of 2012. It has been almost 3 years and only 2 of the 4 desktop operating systems have an interface that works reliably at pixel doubling resolutions: Apple OSX and Google Chrome OS.
Maybe it should be, but it’s not actually a thing of the past. I would bet hard cash that a higher number of recently released expensive monitors ($1000+) don’t have retina than those that did. There is still a massive market for people willing to make the trade off in another direction (like higher refresh rate or going ultrawide) rather than retina.
Obviously it’d be amazing if what you said is true, because both retina and HRR are very nice to have
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