Apple laptop displays

powerbook G5's are coming!!!, then wintel well have to play catch up once again, also apple will have the first 64bit laptop which will make a huge impact
 
powerbook G5's are coming? Where? To me? And from where? And what does it have to do with the current screens? :confused:
 
Haven't we been here already? I already told everyone that Apple will not be the first to deliver a 64-bit CPU in a laptop. AMD64's have been in laptops for some time now, and no they're not wicked expensive they're in the $1500+ range. And before that, SPARC chips were in laptops as well. These are really special purpose and expensive, so you don't see them sold to the consumer market.
 
well maybe I was wrong to say they suck as such but I was just suddenly dissapointed when I read about the alienware offering such higher resolutions
Sorry for the maybe accepted flamebait
I mean I do like my laptop screen but just a higher resolution would suit me maybe not you but thats just my opinion, what I would love is if apple stocked multiple flat panels with different resolutions but all at the same size and as a BTO option you could have the "super" screen with say 1600 x 1000 for 15" widescreen and "ultra" with 1900 x 1200 maybe charging an extra $100 USD for the 1st option and 200 for the second.
What do you think?
 
Bare in mind that putting higher quality LCD panels in Mac notebooks will mean:

1) high prices
2) further limiting availability

#1 is something we've been acustomed to, but I don't think people will appreciate delays in shipping these systems.
 
I think having the multiple options is a good idea - let's the consumer decide what's best for them. That is what Dell used to do a few years ago when I had to buy Wintel laptops - you choose 1024x768 up to 1400x1050 on the same model laptop.

Personally I prefer a higher resolution over more physical area for coding.
 
dflett said:
I think having the multiple options is a good idea - let's the consumer decide what's best for them. That is what Dell used to do a few years ago when I had to buy Wintel laptops - you choose 1024x768 up to 1400x1050 on the same model laptop.

Personally I prefer a higher resolution over more physical area for coding.
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The native resolution of an LCD screen is it's maximum resolution. Those Dell laptops you mentioned have screens that are capable of res. that high, the original complaint is why Apple doesn't use LCD displays that can go that high.

Furthermore, I think another common complaint is that text rendering isn't very customizable. In most other OSes, the user can change font family and size of any text that shows up on the screen - provided that it's real text and not a flat image. And I'm also a little annoyed by the differences in font rendering between Carbon and Cocoa programs. Cocoa programs render text far better than certain Carbon apps, and I'm basing my judgement on Jaguar and backwards, haven't tried Panther yet.
 
The Dell laptop I was talking about (the 7500) could be ordered with different screens. If you like hi res 15 inch then you could order 1400x1050 as the native resolution and if you preferred bigger pixels you could order a 15 inch screen with 1024x768 native resolution (and get a slight reduction in price.) At least that offered the consumer choice which is a good thing in my book - and Dell must have sold enough of each option to make it viable for them.

The argument about OS not being prepared for ultra hi-res screens is a valid one though. They will all have to change soon because very high res screens are already with us - IBM has a 21 (24?) inch TFT screen with a horizontal resolution of around 6000 pixels IIRC. Currently it is less that usuable because the Windows start bar is only a couple of mm high on it!!! And it was $10000 last time I looked.

But back to the thread - I would very much like to see the option on the next generation of PowerBooks of a ordering a higher resolution screen than 'standard'.
 
macs are all about making it simple for the consumer...

as my maths teacher said today, 'i dont see the reason why i have to use a PC when macs are so much simpler'

apple will not start offering a laptop with 2 diff. resolution screens.

if u want that u can go buy and AMD64 laptop and put whatever u want on it... but OOPS, i forgot, thats not a laptop because once u take it off the power plug then the battery life is sucked out as if theres a black hole around :p :p :p
 
As a graphics professional, I'd have to say there's no middle ground. My 15" PB's screen resolution is about perfect. If we had a freely scalable UI in Mac OS X (coming partially in Tiger and probably fully in later OS releases), I'd be all for 300 dpi displays, but we haven't. I've got enough screen real estate with 1280x854 on my PB. If I wanted more pixels, I'd also want the display to be bigger. Unless we're talking 300 dpi, and not like currently with some PC notebooks, 120 or 140 dpi.
 
hulkaros said:
Apple laptop displays DO NOT suck! :p
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I agree! I have used Windoze for 11 years, and have had lots of laptops and base stations, thought that my tft screen on my p4 was good, until i got the 15 powerbook, could not believe how good the screen was/is.

1280 x 854 I love it :eek:
 
Well I suppose I have not had a lot of expreience with so called inferior displays. Maybe your right that it wouldn't be practicle to have a higher DPI at present due to the graphics unscalablity of the OS so prehaps when we have OS 10.6 ot .7 THEN prehaps we will see options in terms of native resolutions.
@Soulseek be nice theres no need to suddenly spout off about AMD64 and be all sarcastic, just trying to have a nice thread, oh and btw if apple released OS X for AMD64 I think I would have bought that instead :)
 
hulkaros said:
@DJ Rep:
Care to let us know what's unscalable on OS X? Are you sure you even know what you are talking about? You should better read here http://www.macosx.com/forums/showpost.php?p=327930&postcount=43 and then let us know what exactly do you mean by "unscalability" of OS X? :rolleyes:
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I'm not speaking on behalf of DJ Rep, he might have a different opinion, but this is mine. I'm not refuting the technological capabilities of the rendering engine of OSX. What I am *complaining* about is the fact that I can't change the size of text seen on the screen. Take for example: a pop-up dialog box displaying a system notification message ("Ding! Fries are done!") To my knowledge there is no way to change the size of that text in the dialog box. I can not make it bigger or smaller. If I compare that rendered text on a 12" iBook screen versus a 14" iBook screen - they both are set to 1024x768 resolution by default - the text on the 14" screen will look "physically" bigger. So when you're dealing with a physically smaller display area at the same resolution, it doesn't scale well meaning the objects you see in the screen are just physically smaller. That's a no-brainer. But again, the complaint is that we can not make text bigger when the visible area is physically smaller. Text is arguably more important that it be easily readable, whereas with shapes and colors our eyes can easily recognize.

Now lets examine web browsers. If the text on a website is too small to read, we can press a few keys to enlarge the text size, and that effects all text on the webpage, unless the CSS blocks it somehow, and obviously static images of words will not change. This is what I want to be able to do with any other normal text shown in the OSX UI. I want to be able to make the icon labels bigger, I want to make text in dialog boxes bigger. As of right now, the only time we can change fonts and size, is in an editable textbox. I want to change the settings on non-editable controls. That's how I feel the OSX UI is lacking, and "doesn't scale well." If the technology to do so is in place, then what's missing is the panel in Sys Prefs to change it.
 
Before I bought my 15" PowerBook I bought a nice Gateway Centrino with the 15" 1400x1050. At first I thought that was the sharpest display I'd ever seen... everything looked so bright and crisp. After the first week of owning it though, I found that the contrast sucked... yeah, the screen was bright but shades of the same color next to each other looked washed out. Also, after that week of using it a lot, I realized that it was giving me eye-strain and headaches from reading the tiny print. 1400x1050 was just way to high for a small 15" laptop display. Of course, turning down the res to even 1280x1024 was bad and was way to fuzzy for serious work. I ended up returning it at lost $200 on the restocking fee.

Even on most desktop LCDs... the native resolution for a 15" is 1024x768. 17" are usually 1280x1024 and 19" are when you get into the 1600x1200 (for good displays). Trying to make a small screen have the same resolution as a much bigger screen seems like a gimmick to me.

Months later I looked at the PowerBooks and found that the screen resolution was just perfect for daily reading and work. Now, the icons could be spaced a bit closer together to save some screen space, but otherwise it's a good resolution. Plus, with the Apple's 72dpi instead of the 96dpi of the PC, I think that helped too.

Two things I dislike about my Apple display though... I can't use it outside (where I could use the Gateway outside) and the dead pixels drive me crazy. :)
 
btoth said:
Now, the icons could be spaced a bit closer together to save some screen space, but otherwise it's a good resolution.
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Which, I might add, has nothing to do with the display or the screen itself -- rather, the software that the machine is running.

Also, how many dead pixels do you have, and have you tried to fix them yourself (via the "gentle rubbing" method)?
 
btoth said:
Plus, with the Apple's 72dpi instead of the 96dpi of the PC, I think that helped too.
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You do realize you could have adjusted that and turned it down to 72. But you're happy now and that's what matters.
 
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