Apple has introduced their new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and it is a photographer’s dream machine. Finally we have a notebook that surpasses the image quality of the old Thinkpad’s, that has an IPS display with the wide viewing angles that are necessary to correctly judge the color of a photo. It will be absolutely amazing to have a display matching the new iPad on a notebook, and for most people the reduced weight will more than compensate for the reduced connections and loss of expandability.
With the removal of the 17″ MacBook Pro, this new machine is intended to replace it, and I wonder how well it will do that. Theoretically it is not a problem, because given the high resolution you can just get a bit closer to the screen to get the same field of view as on the 17″ model. The problem will be the software. It will assume 110 dpi and scale the elements accordingly. But to get the same scaling as you had, you would have to assume 133 dpi * 17.0 / 15.4 = 147 dpi, which is 33% denser. This means you could show on the 17″ display 78% more content, which is a pretty stark contrast, as shown by Aperture.
(110 dpi on 15.4″)
(133 dpi on 17″)
And when writing documents it becomes even worse, with pages you loose 150 pixels from the height, with Word 250 pixels, so your document area shrinks from 1000 pixels to 700 pixels, meaning that with the 17″ you had 40% more vertical space for your documents, even though the screen is only 10% higher.
So for Mac software to work properly in all configurations it will need to support three resolution steps. The basis would be what is currently called small and works best with a 110 dpi iMac display. In addition you still need a larger variant ( 120% or 125%) for people with aging eyes, and now also a smaller variant ( 80%, maybe 75%) for the Retina MacBook.
I wonder how long the transition will take, Apple provides five scaling steps, so hopefully this is a sign that Apple desires to support these steps with new apps.
The loss of extensibility after the fact is not such a big deal, with an 768 GByte option available, and the compact external ethernet connector not eating up much space. Now waiting first for the USB3 update for the Thunderbolt display, and then the Retina update for it as well.