Comment by dangus
1 year ago
You know Apple doesn’t make display panels right? PC and Android manufacturers use the exact same display technology. Microsoft laptops have “retina” displays. Android tablets have “retina” displays. It’s just a brand name for high DPI support. I have a 4K Dell monitor hooked up to my PC and yes I need RAM for it, I don’t find that wasteful because it’s being used.
Android has higher RAM requirements than iOS. Just compare device specs from the same year. Apple was selling flagship phones with 3GB of RAM at the same time Android flagships were packing 8GB.
Android phones actually got higher resolutions before Apple did. A major complaint of the iPhone 6-7-8 era of phones was that they “aren’t even 1080p.”
I seem to recall Samsung selling 1440p phones as well.
Sure I all know this.
My point is Apple has started the nonsense. An insignificant improvement for the average user that has lead to a massive increase of resource consumption. The competition has followed suit because it costs so little, it only increases ecological footprint, but we don't need to pay money for that.
I had a Thinkpad X1C. I was happy about it, battery life when working under Linux was 5-7 hours. It was stolen and I took more or less the same model. Except the old display and integrated GPU where no longer available, resolutions had gone up in the meantime, probably RAM had doubled. The difference in energy consumption was massive, battery life 3-5 hours. I am convinced HDPI support has not made me a better coder, maybe a more grumpy one.
HDPI could be a niche product for medical, scientific and whatnot applications or wherever they really benefit from it. But as long Apple can be the leader in greed ruining the planet for marginal "benefits" that won't happen.
> A major complaint of the iPhone 6-7-8 era of phones was that they “aren’t even 1080p.”
A spec driven complaint. There was nothing seripously wrong with their usability. At least not caused by the resolution.