August 5, 2006 at 12:00 am
The rumor mill is in full swing as the WWDC rapidly approaches. One thing that has been suggested was that Apple may introduce new displays. It's no secret that the current cinema displays are beginning to face some strong competition, particularly from Dell.
While anything's possible, I would imagine that Apple is more likely to hold off on a major update to their displays until next year. Why do I think that? Leopard.
Mac OS X Leopard is very likely to include resolution independence. Resolution independence would allow displays to finally begin seriously increasing their DPI without the elements of user interfaces becoming smaller. For example, the Mac menu bar would remain approximately a quarter of an inch tall, whether it be on a 100 DPI screen or a 200 DPI screen, the 200 DPI screen would just use twice as many pixels to display the menu bar.
To give you an idea of what the difference between 100 DPI and 200 DPI is like, I've included an image in this post. The image shows a sample of text at two different sizes, the top is 24px tall and the bottom is 12px. The bottom sample of text has been doubled in size. The idea is to show you the difference in detail when you double the number of pixels used to express something.
Imagine reading 12pt text on a screen. Today, it looks like the bottom sample of text, except at half the shown size (obviously). Imagine reading 12pt text that has the smoothness of the upper sample. Quite a difference, no?
How does this tie into my prediction about the displays? If Apple updates the line a year from now, Leopard will have been on the market for 6 months, at that time they'll be able to release displays with a higher DPI than what they offer now. That's not to say that they won't offer some incremental improvement at WWDC, but I doubt we'll see anything really major until a year from now.