You said Retina display on a laptop???

Yesterday was Apple big show and they were presenting their new products, and how the iPhone could also face what Steve Jobs was criticizing so much about android: fragmentation! But I digress here and let’s get back on the topic.

One of the biggest announcement done was the new MacBook Pro with the Retina display, a 15″ monitor at a resolution of 2880×1800… Almost everybody was amazed by such high resolution and again all fan-boys could not stop saying how amazing and beautiful it is.

But please, please, think! Think different and use some common sense. I personally own a 30″ display, the Dell U3011, its native resolution is 2560×1600, lower than this new laptop and I can tell you one thing, this image is sharp clean and amazingly readable. Now Apple come and condensed more pixels in a 15″ screen (4 times smaller) how will people be able to read anything if you actually exploit its native resolution??

Let’s take a example, have you ever browse the internet? Yes? You know that 99% of the websites in the WHOLE WORLD are viewable and done for screen with a resolution not higher than 1366×768 simply because this is currently the most common resolution. Now imagine the typical website on you brand new 15″ Retina display… The content of you favorite site would not take half of the width of your display. Go and read it…

So now you have to zoom and everything you want to read and as you zoom on the text, you also zoom on the images and you start to see more and more pixels, more and more blurry elements… Everything displayed is scaled so it doesn’t look too small but by doing that you loose precision.

Of course you also have a lot of software that you have to install on your brand new Mac, and none but the Apple’s one are optimized to be display on such screen, so expect to have “blurry” fonts… The perfect contradiction for a screen that pretend to make things clearer…

Now, I am sure more and more screen will come with this kind of crazy resolution because everybody needs to copy Apple, but I would rather prefer to see screen that are calibrated correctly and stop showing horrible delta-EThe difference or distance between two colors is a metric of interest in color science. It allows people to quantify a notion that would otherwise be described with adjectives, to the detriment of anyone whose work is color critical. Common definitions make use of the Euclidean distance in a device independent color space. The idea is that a dE of 1.0 is the smallest color difference the human eye can see. So any dE less than 1.0 is imperceptible and it stands to reason that any dE greater than 1.0 is noticeable.. Also having a screen that “amazing” you will need to have an amazing battery too and I am not willing to trade my mobility like iPad 3 users who needs 8 hours to recharge their devices.

Once again, Thank you Apple to make of the useless the most wanted need!

UPDATE:  it is even worst than I thought, it seems that you simply can not reach the native resolution of the screen, forcing you you use a maximum of 1920×1200. Be aware, EVERYTHING you watch is scaled and may become very blurry