HiDPI Apple Cinema Display?

Just something I wanted to throw around.

The new Mountain Lion (OS X) is coming in June, along with new Macs. (sources tell me June 16th, don’t know for sure though) Mountain Lion has HiDPI, which basically adds support for retina level graphics. Why would they add this when even their best monitor only has (near) the resolution of the 3x smaller iPad.

Will the new Macs and the Apple Cinema Display feature a much higher resolution now? I’m curious as to what it might be. For a 27” iMac, I’d hope for something like 5120×2880.

The ISSUE here for web developers is having to make sites ‘retina’ compatible. I haven’t heard of any trouble with the new iPad, but with monitors people aren’t going to want to be zooming in and out constantly.

Why would someone need to zoom in and out in HiDPI mode more that in non-HiDPI?

Now, regarding 27” screens with doubled resolution, I don’t think it’s going to happen this summer. Mass production of the iPad screen was already quite a challenge just because of the screen size. I think that they will roll out HiDPI mode for smaller devices first, like MBA or 13/15” MBP , and then gradually update the rest of their devices. I would be really surprised if something bigger than 15” would come out this summer.

Having said that, I can’t wait for movies in 4k to become standard!

We are really waiting for HiDPI macbooks, but it’s unclear if they will be released this year at all. No concrete information on possible display vendor that I know of, with iPad 3 it was known long ago that vendors are delivering HiDPI screens.

I dont think it will be long until the Mac Airs and smaller macbooks are running retina displays. The new mountain lion source has already been confirmed to contain high-res graphics for such displays.

This could mean a huge change in workflow in that now every image created for a theme for example would have to have one double its resolution to look right.

Its not noticeable right now on the smaller screens but if you managed to grab one of the new iPads and look at an image that’s not retina. It looks kind of fuzzy and blown up, the retina version of course being nice and crispy. I cant imagine the level of distortion on say a 27” display. If apple does not cook up something that allows devices to play nice with non-retina graphics they make be backing web developers into corner.

Ya it would be a selling point to have a retina compatible theme but just think of all that extra work

High dpi screens were needed more on tablets because there you scale more often the content. On a normal pc screen you don’t do that so you will not have too much problems with the antialiasing that is needed for content that is scaled.

Probably will have big high dpi screens… and then we’ll need to start working with other units… like css points, dpi or even with the metric system

I’ll use feets in my next stylesheets, kicking some ass.

flashedge said
I’ll use feets in my next stylesheets, kicking some ass.

Sorry for the diversion, does the browsers really support absolute units such as mm, cm, inch etc? Definitively we will need other units than px in few years (I guess millimeter could be more friendly for cross device – web design).

I tried with these units but none of the device / browser renders with correct size. Am I missing something or all the browsers need another decade to standardize all those basic things?

I tried running a high quality video (2440×1440 res) on a couple of iMac’s, a Mac mini and a Mac Pro today with large monitors and none of them could handle it without stuttering! Pretty bad too. My guess is that the video card can’t handle it. But before moving on to even higher resolutions they should sort this out.

SMeesters said
I tried running a high quality video (2440×1440 res) on a couple of iMac’s, a Mac mini and a Mac Pro today with large monitors and none of them could handle it without stuttering! Pretty bad too. My guess is that the video card can’t handle it. But before moving on to even higher resolutions they should sort this out.

Weird, my MBP ran it just fine, even with like 50 some tabs open in Chrome and bunch of other garbage running in the background. It did take a sec or two to buffer up first though. Also made the fans go on.