Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I don't think you'll be alone. With the retina MacBook Pros, Apple really is throwing down the gauntlet here.

And not just because of their advantage in hardware; Windows is notoriously hard to program for in a resolution independent way, and the first double resolution laptop displays are going to cause early adopters no end of pain. Even if Windows 8 brings APIs to fix it, the long tail of apps are not going to be updated any time soon.

I expect this to be an unusually large and concrete reason for everyday people to choose a Mac laptop for the next few years. Side by side, Macs will look amazing. Looked at a 3GS recently? Eww.

Of course, this is assuming OS X has resolution independence nailed; though I'd be amazed if they shipped this if that wasn't the case.

(This is a repost of my comment from a rumor thread; not much has changed)



> Windows is notoriously hard to program for in a resolution independent way

Really? Using which API?


Well, you can use WPF and that pretty much takes care of it from the ground up, but Win32 was never designed to do that.

My point is that the long tail of apps in the wild are going to be problematic, regardless of what new apps do.


OK, so I set my DPI to 200% to check, and I found errors in every app I tried (list below), except for Dropbox, and MonoDevelop. Mostly the errors involve not everything scaling up; certain images or pieces of text will be too small.

That said, it was all purely visual stuff, and the errors were more subtle than I was expecting, so maybe my prediction was a little strong. Though if you track off the beaten path, I'm sure it gets worse - that VB6 App you use to track warehouse supplies may be completely broken.

I tried whatever I use day to day:

Opera, Firefox, Skype, MSN, FlashDevelop, Unity, VLC, UltraEdit, Dropbox, MonoDevelop, TPCView, SmartDefrag




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: