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Cheerful, Apple spokesman aficionado John Gruber talks about four tweets that, according to him, “may” indicate an incoming Apple hardware upgrade, perhaps the introduction of new Retina Display-level Macs or displays. Given his intimate relationship with Apple, you better listen up to his “wishful thinking.”
The latest update — which was pulled by Cupertino after dreadful stability reports — includes some high definition cursors. Here you can see the new Mickey Mouse pointing finger icon, redrawn for high-density displays in Mac OS X 10.7.3, compared to the current one. Other new cursors include the Mickey Mouse grabbing hand icon and the old Nextstep camera, all of them re-rendered at super-high resolution.
Fanboy Número Uno thinks that these icons, coupled by reports of some Mac Minis booting into HiDPI mode after the 10.7.3 update, may indicate that “we may be on the cusp of Apple releasing HiDPI Mac displays and/or HiDPI MacBooks. I.e.: retina display Macs.”
For those new to this party, HiDPI is a new resolution independent mode designed to offer ultra-sharp graphic elements without making them tiny on the screen. As a screen’s pixel density increases, the elements on the screen become smaller and smaller using traditional a display mode. You can observe this effect if you have a very high resolution monitor.
With HiDPI things change: the absolute size of a screen object is kept the same no matter how many pixels per inch you have on the screen. If you keep the size and increase the number of pixels that define the object, then you make it a lot sharper but never physically smaller.
McGruber gives a warning: this may be all his wishful thinking, so be skeptical. A little bit. On the inside. [Matt Gemmell, Cabel Sasser, Cabel Sasser, Dan Wineman via Daring Fireball]
Ultra-High Definition Displays Coming to Macs—More Proof
MacBook Pro Price Reduction Signals Imminent Launch
The Future of High Definition Phone Calls
Can we have this combined with the Rave gloves?
Gruber is often right, but if Apple is prepping for resolution independence it’s nothing new, they’ve been coaxing developers and themselves into using new scalable graphic resources for a while. It’s been long, long coming, but I’d guess at this stage the panel cost has finally become realistic for them.
The new mac cursor looks super gay… That is all.
Did you, er, cut your teeth on Mickey Mouse?
Just wondering about how this might work from a graphics card perspective; my desktop is a little over 4 million pixels (3 off 2560 x 1600) and I need two fairly grunty cards to run it. An iPhone screen has 601,600 pixels (960 x 640) so I guess scaling one up to iPad size would create 4-5 times the number of pixels? i.e. circa 2.7m pixels?
If this logic is correct, iMac retina screens would have a massive pixel count and require loads of graphics power – can someone please clarify?
Thanks
If we judge the screen to be the same technology as retina display, i.e. 326 pixels per inch (square of that per square inch), take a typical Macbook screen to be 11in wide
and 7in tall, that’s 326*326*11*7= 8.1 million pixels.
That’s a lot of pixels.
The density isn’t going to match that of the iPhone – that’s incredibly high and would be unfeasible across higher areas. I’m pretty sure if you look at your computer screen from the distance you look at a phone screen you’ll notice that there’s a vast gap between them which will never be met in a single step.
More likely is that the smaller screens of the Macbooks/Airs will be doubled in pixel count. Doubling the count on a screen as large as the iMac would be insane and slightly pointless seeing as anybody sitting close enough to one of those to notice the difference would probably get dizzy just looking around the screen.
But I saw a report (ponders: was it on here or on TV?) showing a prototype TV (Quad resolution?). I was struck that the picture appeared almost 3D next to the presenter – so albeit that we may not ‘need’ so high a resolution, the closer it gets to actual vision the better, surely?
I hadn’t noticed this new pointer until it was pointed out here…
KHAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!