Will Apple Drop 1920 x 1200 Screen Res on the MBP Refresh

a lot of folks think it will go to 16:9. Will it go down to 1920 x 1080 for the next version of macbook pros 17 inch?

Or will they keep it the same?

The only other alternative is a higher resolution 20x11 or so I forget the exact number

 

That would be awful, I doubt they would ever reduce the resolution. It will probably be the same, as anything higher and text would be too small. The 133 PPI on the 17inch is already very high.

 

2048x1152 QWXGA?
Maybe.

I've newer heard of 2560x1440 LCD panels before IMac27, so Apple may use very recent 2048x1152 screens in 17" too. Actual difference in PPI would be small (133 vs. 138 PPI) so nothing to worry about.

Revent Vaio Z has 168PPI and that's what I call insane!

 

it would be the first laptop with that resolution if so. It would be aweome.
It's actually only like 10% more pixels--if that.

 

Yah, the new Vaio Z is gonna sport a 1920 x 1080 resolution.. which is unheard of on 13.1" laptop...

Let's hope Apple can compete with that... maybe even an IPS monitor too? Who knows.

 

No way...

Price would be even more insane than it already is.

 

I'm not sure what a user would even need 1920 on a 13" screen anyway. The type would be incredibly small.

I think 1920 would be the highest for the 17".

 

It's quite easy to increase the font size.

Sony is offering Full HD on the Z because it's also offering Bluray. From that point of view it makes sense.

Nice video of what else it offers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN3ACR70

 

I have a Dell Pentium 4 laptop with 1920x1200 resolution. Those were easy to find many years ago but I think that there was little demand for them outside of people with excellent vision and they're near impossible to find now. BTW, the Dell laptop size is 15.4 inches.

I'd love much higher resolution on 17 inches (that with Nehalem would be enough to get me to upgrade). My 17 inch Penryn runs fine and should be good for the next five years. I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade in the near-term for performance but higher-res would get me more interested. I'm not interested in less than 1200 vertical pixels - more vertical pixels is better for work.

 

I've been following all threads in detail and very very few people think that they will change the form factor of the MBP line in the refresh. Mind you we could be in for a surprise, but odds are against them going 16:9 at this time.

 

I'd expect 16:9 throughout the product line.

 

Both my notebooks have a DPI right around 133, which seems pretty good to me. It would be awesome if Apple started using IPS screens. I wouldn't buy one as it's more than I personally would spend for a notebook, but it would pressure on other manufacturers, ThinkPads in particular, to use them.

 

For those that do professional work, more vertical resolution would be good. 16:9 is more for entertainment.

 

i think apple will go with the cheapest best quality screen. So if currently the 16:9 is cheaper. that's what we'll be getting.

 

The previous 17 inch notebooks had cost upgrades for 1920x1200 and LED Backlight (I think that I paid the extra $200 for this) so cost is not always the overriding factor.

 

I would prefer 900 vertical lines max on a 15" mu eyes are old.

Hopefully its an option - that way we all win.

 

More resolution is ALWAYS better. If your eyes are bad you can zoom in or change the icon/font size. This is one of the reasons we still have printed material, because its "resolution" is infinite(or whatever the max resolution the human eye can see) and thus reduces strain on the eyes.

 

indeed, Stunner.

 

your eyes don't see in resolution.

printed material does have a resolution, and it is definitely NOT infinite.

but i may just be arguing semantics.

 

Truth be told, most people cannot tell the difference between resolutions...
Which ratio is also a load of hogwash. 16:9 works fine for anything provided the screen doesn't suck.

Frankly you can drop the font size if you want too as well to fit something in a certain number of lines... for those of you who must fit 8 million lines of text in a screen at 1/10000000000000000000000th of a centimeter apiece, if you can see it... fine, however, at one point you have to stop kidding yourself.

In general, more resolution is better, but at what cost and with what sacrifices.
I'd rather a nice 1366x768 than a crappy 1920x1200... for ANY use.

 

I never said we see in resolution. But truth be told I can see the tiny pixels on the screen sitting about 3 feet away(yes my eyes are thankfully still good, despite being in front of a computer extremely often). Compare printed type on a page with good lighting to a screen with equal lighting(brightness) and tell me which is easier to read. The page puts less strain on your eyes. The letters on the page are crisp and there is no slight blur on the letters that you will find on a screen. Increasing the resolution reduces this "blur".

 

Wha? Ratios are hogwash? Are you kidding? 16:10 is ALWAYS better than 16:9, for example. It's the whiners out there who don't like their black bars that caused the 16:10 displays to go 16:9. If it weren't for them, my 27" iMac would be 2560x1600 instead of 2560x1440. The problem with 16:9 is that there's a shortage of vertical resolution, which was obvious even on 16:10, and now we lose even more! Gah!

Anyway, if the MBPs get refreshed, I expect them to fall in line with the iMacs, i.e. 16:9 displays. I hope we get a 1920x1080 display in the MBP 15". It won't be 1920x1200 anymore since that's 16:10...

*sigh* No downside to 16:10. At all. Oh noes. The black bars when watching 16:9 movies! Oh noes!

 

And if you'd never seen a 16:10, 16:9 would be fine.
Captain placebo FTW!

I use a 16:9 screen now, I had a 16:10... neither is a problem... I do so at work, at home and everything in between.
Somehow, I manage to get by... it might be because I can somehow McGuyver it into some sort of screen... or it might be because I don't make a mountain out of a molehill.

People sometimes forget that at one point the best screen you had available was a LOT smaller with a LOT less resolution... and somehow things still got done.

Again, more resolution is indeed better.. but at one point, it just doesn't matter anymore.
For instance, 1400x900 and 1336x768 are simply not noticeable... and frankly the newer screen looks better.
Is there a difference betweenthose two screens and 1920x1200?
Yeah... but its all solvable and not worth having a cow over.

You might want to stop complaining about whiners while you go on like this...
Irony ftw!

 

More vertical resolution is always better for designers. And with that being an important segment of the Apple market, I'm going to hope that they don't go less than 1200 vertical for the MB 17".

 

With regards to the arguments saying that more resolution is always better, that's simply not true for many people (myself included). Right now, the 1920x1200 17" MBP is about at the limit of what I would want to look at for several hours. Yes, I am a kid, so I can see text much much smaller, but it wouldn't be comfortable to do so (for me).

Now, for the people who are saying that you can simply increase the font size, have you ever actually tried doing that? Sure, fonts themselves are vector, but most other UI elements are not. That means that anything that's an image (including webpage elements, raster UI elements, etc.) will be blown up and consequently become distorted/blurred. Really not a proper solution.

 

See, for me personally, i'd love to have a 4:3 screen again. That being said, i know it will never happen.
16:10 is ok, but for me, 16:9 just is too much. I don't watch movies on my computer and really appreciate that little extra bit of vertical space for photoshop, illistrator, etc. That, and with the dock, tab bars and what ever else, all websites have way too much side blank space, and not enough vertical, imagine with a 16:9, it's embellished even more.

 

If your entire market that you are designing for is using 16:9 and you are still designing for 4:3, then you are behind the times and kinda missing what it means to be a designer.

You must see things the way your audience does or you lose touch.

1920x1080 is quite decent.
Indeed, its how a large part of say a web designer's audience will view their web pages as it is 1080p. More and more people are choosing to use their 1080p TVs as their "monitor" for web browsing, movies, and pretty much everything in between.

Viewpoint > 120 pixels IMHO.

 

^ well said.

and really, as a fellow "designer" (print media, web design and development, logo and graphic development), I had ZERO problem going from 1920x1200 to 1920x1080. if anything, it HELPED ME, as sometimes my web designs would be designed at what might fit vertically on my screen. how many people are using monitors out there displaying 1200 vertical lines of resolution?

not anyone's target demographic. i'll tell you that much. on top of that, my 1920x1080 display was of exceedingly better quality than my 1920x1200 screen. IMO, going with anything other than 16:9 is almost a non-starter for me at this point. and that's after 4 years of 1920x1200.

 

> how many people are using monitors out there displaying 1200 vertical
> lines of resolution?

I have five monitors that display 1200 vertical pixels. Looking forward to going to 1440 or 1600.

Dell switched to selling the movie-friendly displays on their consumer laptops and traditional displays for business laptops. I recall the choice between 1600x1200 and 1680x1050 for their 20 inch monitors. The 1600x1200 display was $200 more. They knew that business customers would pony up the extra bucks.

If you're reading code, more vertical space is always nicer. Many engineers that I know use some of their monitors rotated 90 degrees. They might have two monitors in page orientation with the other in the usual landscape orientation. This is, of course, harder to do with laptops.

 

Monitor != TV. I have a 1920x1200 and even that is too wide for my taste. Although its the standard now and somewhat usefully as it displays two pages side by side. I think the current craze for 16:9 is because full HD or 1080p is very marketable. I wouldn't be surprised if they went 1080p on both the 15 and the 17. But if they do it will be a deal breaker for me. Any one who is thinks a high resolution is bad obviously doesn't own a high quality monitor. I have used 1920x1200 on a 15 inch laptop screen, the text and font scaled very nicely and it looked amazingly crisp.

 

Yeah right, because you only use design for stuff on screens, right?
I design interiors, i can use ALL the res i can get for 3dsmax and apps like that. That has NOTHING to do with the product i design. Same goes for photography actually, you really think pro photography is switching along with screen ratio?

 

lol. if you need that much resolution, then surely you're attaching your laptop to a desktop monitor. nobody I know spends most of their time designing on a laptop screen because most of them are too low quality to do the lion's share of work.

right?

RIGHT?

oh, and I don't know a single professional photographer that doesn't use a bigass external monitor for editing pictures. come on, dude. for pro's it's about size and color-accuracy. resolution is a distant third that is typically a non-factor (as high resolution is always included in the price if you buy for size and color accuracy).

 

Right....i do the same, but i'm not always at either of my two desks....so?
And you're saying photgraphers wouldn't mind if high-end screens went to 16:9? That probably won't happen anytime soon because of the wishes of that industry, i'm just asking for the same option and not to be forced to go to 16:9.....not much more to it really.

All the reasons mentioned do not mean you don't still want the most possible out of your portable screen, do they?
I'd personally love for IPS screen to return to laptops and would be willing to pay a decent premiuim for it. And i'd like to get as much workspace on any screen i have too, 10% less vertical is still 10%

 

Hey, some people need their laptop wrapped in heavy reinforced bulletproof and waterproof cases too... It doesn't mean the average one should be that way.

I gotta say, this still doesn't sound like a "need" as much as placebo.

Honestly, don't macs cost enough already? Isn't a mainstream screen that they can find a better and more quality component for for less better than a custom-order screen that takes forever to get or replace?

Given the fact that such needs are usually FAR better served by a larger external 27" and the fact most people can "get by" with 1920x1080 good enough?

I don't miss 4:3 screens nor 16:10 screens.
Maybe I am not drama queen enough...

 

^ well said.

I've been designing for a decade. the 16:9 transition took me about a week to get used to. I've felt no desire to go back.

if anything, I'd really like an even WIDER resolution. 2048 x ????. that way, I can put two 1024 windows next to each other. now THAT would be a value I'd pay a premium for.

 

Nah you're right. Mac is already catering for the masses anyway iso of the pro market they used to aim for.

 

I was talking more about the principle/concept than applying it to the real world right now. I knew someone would give me heat about the reality of magnifying things. The truth is resolution is going to keep increasing and software developers will have to start magnifying everything and will by default. It just isn't the norm right now.