Why Apple didn't make 5K Cinema Display?

[VirtualRain]

Since DP1.3 came out in September, would it be a reasonable expectation for Apple to come out with a 5k thunderbolt in early 2015 alongside an updated Mac line with DP1.3?

edit: or at least an upgrade to the prosumer mac lineup, i.e. Mac Pro, iMac, MBP?

All that came out in Sept. was the announcement of the DP1.3 standard.

It will take time for GPU vendors like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA to implement it into their products, and only then will Apple have access to the technology.

In my opinion, Mac Pro users are not the primary market of the Thunderbolt display. I mean, consider that it's really a display plus laptop dock - including a mag-safe charger. That should tell you everything about the target for the TBD.

So even if a refreshed nMP came out early next year with DP1.3 support, that's unlikely to have any bearing on Apple launching a new 5K TBD. I don't think we will see a 5K Thunderbolt Display until Intel's integrated GPUs offer DP1.3 which will be Broadwell at the earliest but possibly Skylake.

EDIT: However, Apple might surprise us... maybe they will launch a 5K TBD display that uses dual TB ports with a new integrated right angle dual TB connector or something that makes it feel like less of a kludge. Who knows.

 

[lombax54]

All that came out in Sept. was the announcement of the DP1.3 standard.

It will take time for GPU vendors like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA to implement it into their products, and only then will Apple have access to the technology.

In my opinion, Mac Pro users are not the primary market of the Thunderbolt display. I mean, consider that it's really a display plus laptop dock - including a mag-safe charger. That should tell you everything about the target for the TBD.

So even if a refreshed nMP came out early next year with DP1.3 support, that's unlikely to have any bearing on Apple launching a new 5K TBD. I don't think we will see a 5K Thunderbolt Display until Intel's integrated GPUs offer DP1.3 which will be Broadwell at the earliest but possibly Skylake.

EDIT: However, Apple might surprise us... maybe they will launch a 5K TBD display that uses dual TB ports with a new integrated right angle dual TB connector or something that makes it feel like less of a kludge. Who knows.

Makes sense.

IMO, I just feel that since they came out with a 5k iMac, which is geared toward prosumers, and since Apple loves interconnecting their own products, a 5k Apple branded display isn't unreasonable to expect. A lot of those who do video editing on the 5k will want a secondary display and while the current TB display is very nice, sitting next to a 5k display makes it look like crap.

 

[VirtualRain]

Like I said, I just tested it, Photoshop did not preserve the pixel for pixel output size.

You're right... upon closer examination it's the same for Apeture and Camtasia... I thought my images weren't being scaled and were being rendered at 1:1, but upon closer inspection, they are being scaled. It seems the whole desktop (except image content) is first rendered at double your scaled desktop resolution and then down sampled to fit the display resolution. So the content is being excluded from the first step in the scaling algorithm (doubling resolution) but not the second down-sampling step. Non scaling of image content does appear to work properly in "Best for Retina".

EDIT: This became apparent in examining the screen shots above. In a scaled mode, such as I'm running (1680x1050) on my 2560x1440 display, the desktop is being rendered in the frame buffer at 3360x2100 (double) but the image content (e.g. at 1920x1080) was not doubled. The resulting screen shot is 3360x2100 but the image is still at 1920x1080. Of course, then that 3360x2100 frame is down sampled to fit on the actual physical display (2560x1440) and it's here where the content gets scaled along with everything else. The result is you can work on larger images at 100% than you might usually, but that's deceiving because they are not truly at 100% on the down sampled desktop.

EDIT2: I spent some more time on this today... and it seems that even though everything at retina scaled resolutions is down sampled to fit the physical display, image manipulation is still occurring at the image pixel level... not the screen pixel level. In fact, the concept of physical pixels is non-existent at retina scaled resolutions. When you select an area of an image, you're selecting image pixels, not screen pixels. So 1:1 pixel manipulation and pixel perfect editing is possible, it's just not necessarily mapped 1:1 to display pixels.

 

[Cubemmal]

Ehhhhh. This isn't true. Check out auto layout, and springs and struts before it (which was the system since 10.0 and before.)

I professionally develop for iOS and Android and many platforms before that and am familiar with that and more. Struts and such are just relative layout hints for absolute positioning elements, such as buttons and text. Now you can dynamically alter fonts and widgets and they'll scale, but when its done automatically by the system the results are usually terrible. Which is what you need to do when the pixel density changes. It's more of an issue on a full-screen only system such as mobile, which is why the iPad "phone compatibility mode" (2x IIRC) didn't look that great.

Fonts in particular are troublesome, with proportional scaling (i.e. anything other than fixed width) you don't know what you'll get.

 

[fuchsdh]

I'm still confused on why Apple went with 5k instead of 4k on this. They could have had a new Thunderbolt display and allowed target display mode on the iMacs. Now we have to wait for Thunderbolt/graphics cards to catch up to 5k.

Because 5K is the clean 2x pixel doubling of the 1440p display in the iMac. Go to 4K in the 27 inch and it would not be as pretty. The 21" going 4K will be pretty crazy when it happens

The downside for pros is that of course there's no connector that presently exists for 5K, so we'll probably be waiting years (thanks to the lag between connector specs and what becomes Xeon parts) to get it. But who knows.

(In the meantime Apple should really drop the prices of the ACD, but I'm guessing there are enough people who like it and buy it at that price. It's still a great monitor, but priced way over comparable systems at this point.)

 

[goMac]

I professionally develop for iOS and Android and many platforms before that and am familiar with that and more. Struts and such are just relative layout hints for absolute positioning elements, such as buttons and text.

Isn't every layout system, Android, Windows, etc at the end of the day just relative layout hints for absolute positioning? At some point, to output to a bitmap display, a system has to do absolute positioning.

Now you can dynamically alter fonts and widgets and they'll scale, but when its done automatically by the system the results are usually terrible. Which is what you need to do when the pixel density changes. It's more of an issue on a full-screen only system such as mobile, which is why the iPad "phone compatibility mode" (2x IIRC) didn't look that great.

This isn't true. For example, when the iPhone 4 came out, it would automatically change the pixel density of some elements in apps that were otherwise not updated for 2x.

All the choices that Apple has made have been to reduce testing load and uncertainty around code. There has been nothing stopping the system for doing dynamic scaling. You can force iPhone apps into iPad apps when you jailbreak, and they'll dynamically render just fine. Apple basically did that because they didn't want developers having to worry about new configs.

It's worth nothing with iOS 8 Apple has discarded that, and told developers they will now have to worry about being rendered at any size. They haven't introduced any technology changes for this. Springs and struts, auto layout, etc are all still compatible with this idea. Apple just removed the guidance they previously had.

Just like Android, there is no reason you can't have one layout, springs and struts or auto layout, to service infinite device sizes.

Again, it's worth nothing that OS X has supported both dynamic layouts and dynamic densities since 10.4, and iOS 2.0 shipped with the exact same layout system as 10.4. iOS has supported multiple densities since launch, since like OS X, layouts are done in points, not pixels.

Nowhere in the developer tools can you actually do pixel based layouts. It's all points.

Fonts in particular are troublesome, with proportional scaling (i.e. anything other than fixed width) you don't know what you'll get.

Yes, that is true. Mac OS X by default will render all fonts at 2x scaling even on 1x displays to prevent problems as you transition between displays. However, that's a problem unique to systems where you could have both 1x and 2x displays present on the same box.