This is old, and includes an update mentioning Apple's Retina Macbook Pro, introduced after the article was published.
I think a better question is why nobody else is offering high-res panels on laptops. The Nexus 10 tablet has more pixels than any non-Apple laptop ever produced.
I just bought a $500 laptop for my father and was surprised at how laptop displays haven't gotten much better since I last shopped over 3 years ago. They're all x768, even on 15.6" notebooks. The pixels are easily noticeable on the 15" Samsung I bought for him. I would have thought displays improved over all these years, even on low end laptops, but I guess other than the shift to LED-lit screens a few years ago, not much else has happened outside of MacBooks and some Ultrabooks.
At 500$ I wouldn't be surprised at all. Did you read the article? That's just 200$ over the manufacturing cost of a retina iphone. I'm rather surprised that lenovos retailed at 2500$ are still stuck at low resolutions - and they still have quality control issues like overheating GPUs. People that call out rMBPs as expensive clearly don't get what they're about, there are simply no comparable alternatives at that price point.
Note: Other points critizised such as repairability are very valid however.
Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops? At least this time around they have offered sane maxed out Ram options, so those who know they'll need that in the future can buy it that way - which is what I did. Yes the 16GB option is expensive, but it's still a reasonable price for the value you get (a high chance of plus 2-3 years in lifetime since the build quality is very solid plus the comforting feeling to never care about Ram - fire up your VMs as you like).
Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops?
For most people, I imagine not.
I have upgraded the RAM in every laptop I've owned in the past decade, and either upgraded the hard drive, or moved an old one over in most. In my current laptop, I also upgraded the motherboard to one that wasn't quite intended to work so that I could have a UXGA IPS panel and 8GB of RAM in the same machine. I also upgraded the CPU on that board, and will upgrade to a QXGA panel if I can find a good price.
I'm not sure I'd care much about upgradeability if I was selling laptops, but it matters a great deal to me when I'm buying them.
I can't quite believe the bit about the retina iPhone screens being a large cost. If I can buy replacement panels (screen, touch sensor and glass) for under $10 shipped, I highly doubt they cost more than $8 a pop to make.
That's insane! You'd be better off getting a replacement iPhone from Apple at those prices. I guess Apple is being tighter with their manufacturers this time around.
Until recently, graphics scaling didn't work very well - so high resolution meant tiny icons and text over-running its allocated space.
OS and software vendors didn't fix this because no-one had high resolution displays, and display makers didn't make high resolution displays because everything looked like ass.
I'm not a big apple user, but I'll admit there are times when having the hardware and OS designed under the same command has its advantages.
I'm inclined to think that since Windows 2000 or so, the OS provided the functionality a vendor would have needed to include some sort of zoom-and-smooth software so as to render vector fonts sharply and bitmaps at sane sizes. That nobody made the effort is yet one more symptom of the general lack of courage and originality in the PC market.
2048x1536 displays were available on laptops a decade ago[0], and they were IPS. That's a megapixel more than 1920x1080.
I'm sure the inability of Windows to cope with the high resolution gracefully was part of the reason those never really caught on, but there wasn't much of an effort to market them either. Did you know they existed? I barely did, and I pay a great deal of attention to such things. There was no meaningful effort to market them. They were custom-order options that only a few enthusiasts and institutional IT departments would even be aware existed.
My mother knows what a "retina display" is.
[0] If you're curious, the models offering QXGA panels were the NEC Versa P700 and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50p. Such panels can be made to work with several other 15" 4:3 Thinkpad models.
Comments
This is old, and includes an update mentioning Apple's Retina Macbook Pro, introduced after the article was published.
I think a better question is why nobody else is offering high-res panels on laptops. The Nexus 10 tablet has more pixels than any non-Apple laptop ever produced.
I just bought a $500 laptop for my father and was surprised at how laptop displays haven't gotten much better since I last shopped over 3 years ago. They're all x768, even on 15.6" notebooks. The pixels are easily noticeable on the 15" Samsung I bought for him. I would have thought displays improved over all these years, even on low end laptops, but I guess other than the shift to LED-lit screens a few years ago, not much else has happened outside of MacBooks and some Ultrabooks.
At 500$ I wouldn't be surprised at all. Did you read the article? That's just 200$ over the manufacturing cost of a retina iphone. I'm rather surprised that lenovos retailed at 2500$ are still stuck at low resolutions - and they still have quality control issues like overheating GPUs. People that call out rMBPs as expensive clearly don't get what they're about, there are simply no comparable alternatives at that price point.
Note: Other points critizised such as repairability are very valid however.
Its a good strategy, make the best first impression and the best of everything visible.
Repairability and upgrade costs are hard to SEE at purchase.
Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops? At least this time around they have offered sane maxed out Ram options, so those who know they'll need that in the future can buy it that way - which is what I did. Yes the 16GB option is expensive, but it's still a reasonable price for the value you get (a high chance of plus 2-3 years in lifetime since the build quality is very solid plus the comforting feeling to never care about Ram - fire up your VMs as you like).
Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops?
For most people, I imagine not.
I have upgraded the RAM in every laptop I've owned in the past decade, and either upgraded the hard drive, or moved an old one over in most. In my current laptop, I also upgraded the motherboard to one that wasn't quite intended to work so that I could have a UXGA IPS panel and 8GB of RAM in the same machine. I also upgraded the CPU on that board, and will upgrade to a QXGA panel if I can find a good price.
I'm not sure I'd care much about upgradeability if I was selling laptops, but it matters a great deal to me when I'm buying them.
I can't quite believe the bit about the retina iPhone screens being a large cost. If I can buy replacement panels (screen, touch sensor and glass) for under $10 shipped, I highly doubt they cost more than $8 a pop to make.
A replacement LCD and digitizer for an iPhone 5 currently sells for a few hundred dollars:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=shop&q=iphon...
That's insane! You'd be better off getting a replacement iPhone from Apple at those prices. I guess Apple is being tighter with their manufacturers this time around.
It is because the PC industry doesn't innovate. It was driven to commoditization and 4 to 5 percent profit margins.
Until recently, graphics scaling didn't work very well - so high resolution meant tiny icons and text over-running its allocated space.
OS and software vendors didn't fix this because no-one had high resolution displays, and display makers didn't make high resolution displays because everything looked like ass.
I'm not a big apple user, but I'll admit there are times when having the hardware and OS designed under the same command has its advantages.
I'm inclined to think that since Windows 2000 or so, the OS provided the functionality a vendor would have needed to include some sort of zoom-and-smooth software so as to render vector fonts sharply and bitmaps at sane sizes. That nobody made the effort is yet one more symptom of the general lack of courage and originality in the PC market.
It's that the software (Windows primarily) can't adapt for high PPI displays. 1920x1080 displays on laptops were around several years ago.
2048x1536 displays were available on laptops a decade ago[0], and they were IPS. That's a megapixel more than 1920x1080.
I'm sure the inability of Windows to cope with the high resolution gracefully was part of the reason those never really caught on, but there wasn't much of an effort to market them either. Did you know they existed? I barely did, and I pay a great deal of attention to such things. There was no meaningful effort to market them. They were custom-order options that only a few enthusiasts and institutional IT departments would even be aware existed.
My mother knows what a "retina display" is.
[0] If you're curious, the models offering QXGA panels were the NEC Versa P700 and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50p. Such panels can be made to work with several other 15" 4:3 Thinkpad models.
I don't see how they could actively market something that is broken for the majority - most people don't want tiny text and icons.