Josh Ong
John Gruber of Daring Fireball on Monday pointed to a series of Twitter posts (1, 2) outing UI resources that scale to larger sizes in the latest release of Mac OS X Lion, which arrived last week.
The new elements include the pointing-finger cursor in Safari, the "grabby hand" in Mail, and the camera cursor for taking screenshots and a few others. One straightforward reason for the change could be that Apple wanted to improve the look of the Universal Access zoom feature. But, reports from some Mac Mini users outputting to HDTVs over HDMI that upgrading to 10.7.3 caused their system to reboot into HiDPI mode have added to the mounting evidence that Apple is planning for high-definition Mac displays.
Apple added HiDPI modes to Mac OS X Lion last year, but they were previously only accessible by installing Xcode. HiDPI is modeled after the UI resolution doubling that takes place on Retina Display iPhones.
Image enlarged 2X.
Gruber went on to wonder "whether we may be on the cusp of Apple releasing HiDPI Mac displays and/or HiDPI MacBooks. I.e.: retina display Macs." He did, however, add that he has been anticipating "super-high-resolution Mac displays" for over five years, so his speculation should be taken with "a grain of wishful-thinking salt."
Late last year, a rumor emerged that Apple was preparing new versions of its MacBook Pro lineup with double the resolution. The resulting display for a 15-inch MacBook Pro would be 2,880 by 1,800 pixels and is expected to set off "a new round of competition for panel specifications."
Chipmaker Intel has indicated that its next-generation Ivy Bridge processors will support resolutions up to 4K, or 4,096 by 4,096 pixels per monitor. Multiple reports have suggested that the company will launch its Ivy Bridge Processors in the second quarter of 2012, and Apple is expected to begin adding Ivy Bridge chips to its Macs in soon after. Wallpapers as large as 3,200 by 2,000 pixels were also discovered in a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion last year.
Andrew Orr
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Appleinsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
31 Comments
Nailed it! Maybe, but at least I'm not the only one with the thought though this is coming quite bit later than I would have expected. Usually these "discoveries" get noted much sooner.
Why would the fingers be bent? That just looks odd.
Is HiDPI any different than the DPI setting in Windows? I have a 1920x1080 15' display in my laptop and by default it was eye explodingly small, but I was able to set the DPI to 125% and everything looks great. From what we've read so far it seems like all visual aspects will still be the same size, just with higher resolution, but what if we want to change the size? Would it support non-factorial scaling?
Anyways, this is exciting, about time someone pushed the industry forward. Other components (minus maybe batteries) have gotten immensely better over the last few years, but displays have pretty much been stuck at the same resolutions. The only downside to this is games would have to run at non-native resolution, but everything else should benefit. I wonder if the GPU would pull any more juice for regular tasks though?
I HATE YOU SO MUCH. I WANT TO THROW YOU INTO A VAT OF MOLTEN ALUMINUM.
The new pointer is hideous. The old one had such CLASS to it. ONE pixel inset for the curve at the top of the glove. ONE pixel border.
Not this monstrosity. It looks like an amateur hour map over at the Alternate History forum.
Why would the fingers be bent? That just looks odd.
Is HiDPI any different than the DPI setting in Windows? I have a 1920x1080 15' display in my laptop and by default it was eye explodingly small, but I was able to set the DPI to 125% and everything looks great. From what we've read so far it seems like all visual aspects will still be the same size, just with higher resolution, but what if we want to change the size? Would it support non-factorial scaling?
Anyways, this is exciting, about time someone pushed the industry forward. Other components (minus maybe batteries) have gotten immensely better over the last few years, but displays have pretty much been stuck at the same resolutions. The only downside to this is games would have to run at non-native resolution, but everything else should benefit. I wonder if the GPU would pull any more juice for regular tasks though?
1) They technologies are different but I think it's safe to say they are essentially the same thing.
2) MS has been far ahead of Apple in this area for a long time when they released the Windows Presentation Foundation. While not truly RI it did allow for scaling of elements much better than Apple who tentatively promised us RI back in Tiger before removing it from the website, and then basically left it as an unfinished work that you could enable with a PLIST switch.
3) I now know your real name.
Lol...From my identical comment on Gizmodo, I'm guessing? Who do you post as over there?