• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

I Like Kill Nerds

The blog of Australian Front End / Aurelia Javascript Developer & brewing aficionado Dwayne Charrington // Aurelia.io Core Team member.

  • Home
  • Aurelia 2
  • Aurelia 1
  • About
  • Aurelia 2 Consulting/Freelance Work

Things I Have Noticed After Switching To A Retina Display

General · September 18, 2014

The retina display is like beer goggles. It makes things that usually look bad look better, but it also makes things that used to look okay look worse
– Dwayne on the Retina Display (2014)

Text looks clearer, sites using high resolution graphics look crisper, viewing photos and movies looks like you’re looking at them on a jewel encrusted high definition television and saving parentless orphans from a burning orphanage, these are some of the things the Retina Display offers.

As a front-end developer I am staring at Sublime Text Editor, Google Chrome and a Terminal window pretty much all day long. The Retina Display without sounding like someone who has drunk the Apple kool-aid TOO much, everything feels much better to look at.

Having said that, other than the way it makes me feel, it could all be in my head or perhaps some part of my brain trying to validate the almost $2000 purchase I made buying this MacBook Pro instead of putting it towards a house deposit…

But when things go wrong…

Not everything is rainbows and diamond covered candy, the Retina Display has a tendency to make some things look atrocious.

Case in point: I built a site for a client a while back (who I won’t name or link to) who only had low resolution images that they requested scale up within a container, I told them they needed better resolution images or it would look horrible. They said they would update them later, they never did update them.

Looking at the site on my Windows PC non-fancy monitor, it looked fine, but you could even notice the artifact on that screen, so then I checked on the Retina Display.

It burns, it burns. Make it stop.
– Dwayne looking at a client website with low resolution images on a retina display, 2014

I thought the graphics looked bad, but the Retina Display makes them look REALLY bad and I don’t just mean a little bit noticeable, a lot noticeable. In-fact, I sent them another email after writing this because it looks that bad, it makes me sick to my stomach.

The little things

When using a Retina Display, screenshots you take on your Mac are double the size they would be on a non Retina Display. A Retina Display at full brightness will burn your retinas out, literally. The bumped up pixel value means things are more vivid and brighter which can be harsh on the eyes if you don’t turn down the brightness a little.

These are very much first world problems and with any new technology comes its teething problems. I see the value in Retina Displays and in the not too distant future, high resolution displays will be the new norm. But for now, they’re more a gimmick and really only featured on higher-end notebooks.

Dwayne

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Primary Sidebar

Popular

  • Testing Event Listeners In Jest (Without Using A Library)
  • How To Get The Hash of A File In Node.js
  • Waiting for an Element to Exist With JavaScript
  • Thoughts on the Flipper Zero
  • How To Get Last 4 Digits of A Credit Card Number in Javascript
  • How To Paginate An Array In Javascript
  • How To Mock uuid In Jest
  • How to Copy Files Using the Copy Webpack Plugin (without copying the entire folder structure)
  • Reliably waiting for network responses in Playwright
  • Wild Natural Deodorant Review

Recent Comments

  • Dwayne on Is Asking Developers How to Write FizzBuzz Outdated?
  • kevmeister68 on Is Asking Developers How to Write FizzBuzz Outdated?
  • Kevmeister68 on Start-Ups and Companies That Embrace Work From Anywhere Will Be More Likely to Survive the Coming Recession in 2023
  • kevmeister68 on What Would Get People Back Into the Office?
  • Dwayne on PHP Will Not Die

Copyright © 2023 · Dwayne Charrington · Log in

wpDiscuz