Only Apple could get away with charging a $400 premium for a feature that no one needs, few people will notice, doesn’t work with most apps, and was not on anyone’s wish list until the company announced it last month.
Apple’s ultra high-resolution Retina display may be a valuable innovation on the iPhone and iPad – but it’s a solution in search of a problem on the MacBook Pro. Until Apple unveiled the new machine at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, no one thought the resolution on current MacBook Pros was insufficient.
“This is certainly not a product feature; it’s a marketing feature, and it’s not a compelling one when you consider all the other decisions that have to go into the overall choice [of a PC] that a consumer makes,” says James McQuivey, analyst for Forrester Research.
“Until you saw it, you didn’t know you wanted it,” adds Frank Gillett, another Forrester Research analyst.
Now that it’s here, though, it’s being hailed as a significant breakthrough, the new standard for laptop screens. But many analysts still argue that most people won’t even notice the difference between a Retina display and a standard MacBook Pro screen.
What Retina Costs
Buying a MacBook Pro with Retina means shelling out at least $2,199 for a notebook with a 15.4-inch, 2880×1800 display. Top-end models approach $3,500!
By comparison, the cheapest 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,799, with half the resolution and a different but roughly comparable set of features and specifications. (The Retina version is smaller and lighter but lacks a DVD drive, and uses expensive Flash storage instead of a slower conventional hard drive.)
The problem is that most websites, images and third-party software don’t support the Retina’s additional resolution. While Apple has rewritten its software to look and perform great with the Retina MacBook, it’s a crapshoot how other software interfaces will look.
The same holds true for most Web images. Because Web graphics are of much lower resolution than a Retina display, they’re unlikely to offer the impressive detail Apple promises. In fact, many images and even text could look slightly
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