Are You Sure You Really Want A Retina Display MacBook Pro? – The ‘Book Mystique
Apple didn’t invent the laptop computer, but over the past 21 years they’ve continuously set and reset the bar for laptop innovation and engineering advances, with PC competitors mostly playing catch-up. Apple either pioneered or popularized laptop features like set back keyboards with palm rests and touchpads, to say nothing of metal enclosures and ultra-thin form factors, culminating in the paradigm-altering and much-copied MacBook Air.
For the past decade, Apple’s PowerBook, iBook, and MacBook laptops have been the company’s best-selling Macintosh computers, and while since its release in October, 2010 the MacBook Air has received the lion’s share of accolades and media attention, the best-selling Apple notebook model has actually been the 13-inch MacBook Pro — a form factor that debuted as a just plain MacBook back in 2008, and which has consistently been Apple’s most laptop for the money since it morphed into the entry level MacBook Pro model in April, 2009.
However, if the rumor mills are correct about what some are projecting to be a marquee feature of the next-generation MacBook Pro — radically higher-resolution “Retina”-grade displays — I’m skeptical that other vendors in the laptop category will be following along en masse.
Speculation about thinner, more powerful, Intel Ivy Bridge-powered Macbook Pros with a MacBook Air-like form factor has been building for months, and rumor buzz that the new models will feature ultra high resolution Retina displays has been gaining traction over the past couple of weeks. It’s certainly a plausible scenario given that Apple has already already gone with Retina displays across the board in its third-generation New iPads. On the technical side it’s been enabled by Intel’s building Retina-quality display resolution support into its Ivy Bridge family of Core i processors. More evidence pointing toward the likelihood of ultra high resolution Mac laptops in the works has been found in reported spottings of “Retina Ready” application icons in Apple OS X updates, and a patent filed by Apple on January 20, 2012 entitled “User-Interface Design,” updating a 2007 patent application covering the reformatting processes of graphical elements for higher resolution displays.
How high a resolution? “Retina” is an Apple marketing term rather than a clearly defined technical standard, although it isn’t bereft of some objective meaning. TUAW’s Richard Gaywood has sweated the pertinent math and come up with some provisional definitions, noting that one can take some typical viewing distances for different Apple devices, combine it with the screen size and resolution, and calculate how closely the screen comes to his definition of a Retina display. A Google spreadsheet posted here explains how he arrived at his calculated metrics and shows that Apple’s definition of Retina display aligns quite closely with his mathematic derivation, and that many current Mac displays are a lot closer to Retina display levels than might have been your impression. Consequently, Gaywood observes that that in order to achieve, or even handily exceed, his mathematical threshold for Retina display quality Apple would not need to anywhere near double resolutions on most of its displays, pointing out that Apple’s current 15-inch MacBook Pro with the optional high-resolution display is already 90 percent there, and that the 17-inch Pro already surpasses (101%) the minimum threshold for “Retina” resolution. Even the 13-inch MacBook Pro is in shouting distance (82%) of Retina quality, and the standard-res 15-inch MacBook Pro not radically short of it at 77 percent.
Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee has pointed out that in order to qualify Apple laptop displays as Retina-grade across the board, the following screen resolutions would do the trick:
11.6-inch MacBook Air – 1680 x 1050 – 109%
13.3-Inch MacBook Air – 1920 x 1200 – 110%
15.4-Inch MacBook Pro – 1920 x 1200 – 102%
For some context, the iPhone 4S display is only 105% of the calculated minimum Retina spec. So if we’re talking a maximum 20 to 25 percent increase in pixel count for MacBook Pro displays, that should be eminently doable without introducing serious battery charge life and processor power demand issues.
On the other hand, if, as has been speculated, MacBook Retina displays would have double the screen resolution (say 2,880 x 1800 pixels vs. the current 15-inch MacBook Pro’s 1,440 x 900-pixel display) with 4x the pixel count of the preceding models’ standard panels, as is the case with the New iPad, then demand on battery and computing resources would be substantial and impose a penalty on the new machines’ performance progress. For example, the New iPad, despite having a nearly 70 percent larger battery than the iPad 2 (11,666 mAH vs. 6,944 mAH) that takes commensurately longer to charge, and twice the number of graphics processor cores, the third-generation tablet is no faster and in some contexts actually slower and has shorter battery runtime than the iPad 2, as well as being heavier, thicker and hotter-running. All of which is in support of what essentially amounts to eye-candy or at best engineering overkill. That amounts to regression rather than progress in the estimation of some of us.
Ultra high resolution screens offer few functional advantages beyond the obvious enhancement in image quality and the ability to display more stuff simultaneously within a given physical area. And the latter is not an unalloyed blessing for those of us past the half-century mark whose eyes have difficulty focusing on small images and especially text. Personally, while my old Pismo PowerBooks with their low-res 14.1-inch 1024 x 768 resolution displays pose little problem, but my 13.3-inch MacBook’s display that serves up a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels (still relatively low-res by today’s standards) can be a challenge with the default text rendering in some applications and Websites.
A switch to Retina-grade screens is likely to also result in hiked price points to compensate for the increased OEM cost of Retina displays. CNET’s Josh Lowensohn and Brooke Crothers reported that while super high-resolution 13.3-inch and 15.4-inch panels are already available in the OEM supply channel, they cost substantially more than the standard resolution screens used in current Apple notebooks. Lowensohn and Crothers cite projections by NPD DisplaySearch Senior Analyst Richard Shim that the high-res screens will cost nearly $100 more than the panels Apple currently uses in MacBooks — 15.4-inch OEM units costing about $160 as opposed to $68 for current model panels, and $134 for 13.3-inch model, compared to $69 for the current 13.3 inch displays Apple uses in its MacBook Pros. The operative question is how much of the added OEM level cost for high-res displays will be passed on to consumers. Apple held its iPad 2 price points for its Retina third-generation iPads, but Lowensohn and Crothers observe, based on IHS iSuppli estimates, that the third-generation iPad’s display costs Apple $87 – only $30 more than the the iPad 2 panel’s $57 OEM cost.
CNET’s Dan Ackerman suggests that Retina displays for MacBook Pros (and possibly MacBook Airs as well) may fit in the “be careful what you wish for category.” Citing his CNET colleagues Josh Lowensohn and Brooke Crothers, Ackerman notes that the most likely way a “Retina” MacBook would work would be via a special mode called HiDPI which recognizes that while there are more pixels, the scale of the display is the same, observing that Apple added support for this feature to OS X 10.7 last year, but hasn’t yet made it easily available to users. He notes that while it’s arguably possible to get away with the pixel density of a 2,560 x 1,600 screen on a 15-inch notebook, increasing the native resolution of a display will, as I noted above, make text, icons, and images all appear smaller, and putting a 1080p display on a 13-inch laptop would make Websites and text appear unacceptably small in a many instances, so Apple would be obliged to use HiDPI to keep things readable, meaning resolution and screen size alone would no longer be fixed determinants of what content will look like on a laptop panel, causing comparison shopping confusion. Not to mention the higher-res displays’ more intensive demands placed on computing power and battery reserves, and consequent greater heat generated.
Cult of Mac’s Brownlee observes that while it’s possible Apple will bull ahead and introduce resolution-doubled displays with its new MacBook Pros, such a move doesn’t make much sense, noting that Mac laptops simply don’t need an iPhone or iPad-style evolutionary leap in display resolution, already being some of the best displays on the planet, and in order to technically go Retina most models only need a modest resolution nudge. He sensibly points out that are more important factors ultimately influencing perceived display quality of imaging than resolution. Examples would be things like brightness, color-rendering, contrast, viewing angle, and the type of screen surface. I agree. Obsessive focus on “Retina” resolution is counterproductive.
Hopefully, if Retina-grade MacBook screens are on its agenda, Apple will take the more conservative approach, which would eventually be emulated by its PC competitors and maintain Apple’s vanguard status in the evolution of laptop computer engineering. However, if they go a radical resolution-doubling route, sacrificing other aspects of laptop performance at the altar of extreme screen resolution, probably not so much.
