Oh No: The Retina Display Will Break the Web!
by Mitchel Ahern Thursday, March 22nd, 2012(Editor: Every so often our consultants have an in-depth email conversation between themselves on topics of emerging technology. These conversations are often informative and entertaining, so I’ve been tidying them up and posting them to our blog. This session focuses on the impact the Apple iPad retina display will have on the internet)
George White
A couple of articles (from Stephanie Rieger and PPK, both pretty good thinkers, IMO) on why the retina display on the new iPad is a bad thing.
TL;DR: having to push down graphics that look good on the new display is a real problem over today’s data connections. And the web doesn’t really have a good solution for doing it yet.
My take: yes, jpegs are gonna look [bad], and most people won’t [care].
Adam Stachelek
That retina display would look a lot better if it ran Flash.
Dan Barron
+1
Ian Cox
Best review I’ve read yet.
Alec Francesconi
There are some interesting discussions and points in these blogs – to me the following line sums it up: “it’s either way ahead of its time, or it’s a dud. We’ll figure out which in the next year or so.”
Clearly it won’t be a dud from a sales perspective, to me the real question is how long will it take for various solutions to the “problem” to be in place and available for wide use and deployment. The whole discussion feels like the classic pull-push of technology innovation, but the speed with which the “push” happens is unprecedented. One of the responses to one of the blogs drew a parallel with the auto industry and how it pushed other innovations, particularly in our infrastructure, to support advances in automobiles; however they conveniently left out that the changes took place of decades, not months or even years….that’s what is different about this particular device and whether this “breaks” the internet or is at least the tipping point from a network perspective will become apparent within the next few months or year at the outset. Should be interesting.
Ian Cox
Here is a nice (albeit exhaustive) screen comparison between iPad2/3/iPhone4.
Adam Stachelek
I think it’s interesting that some folks (Paul Irish) are pushing SVG graphics now in light of the retina display. I don’t think SVG solves every (or even most) problem that are currently solved by raster images, but it’s a worthwhile look for non-raster imagery to use SVG so that it can scale to any resolution. I’m thinking things like logos, navigation icons, anything that looks like it just came out of Adobe Illustrator (well maybe not anything). This is a good example of the push / pull driving new techniques and innovation.