The Problems with a Retina Display on the Mac

The latest build of Lion includes some icons which are sized at 1024x1024. That's twice the current 512x512 size of icons in Snow Leopard. Additionally, on April 2nd, Mac blog OSXDaily found some of the default wallpaper resolutions in Lion to be as large as 3200×2000 pixels (see the shot below). A few observers noted that this is higher than any Apple display has ever supported, generating speculation that Apple is preparing for "Retina" display Macs in the near future.

Taking cues from iOS, Apple has reportedly built in support for what it calls "HiDPI display modes". These HiDPI modes allow developers to supply 2x-enlarged images to support double-high resolution displays. Like the iPhone 4's Retina Display, this means that user interface elements will remain the same size, but everything will be twice the resolution and therefore twice as detailed.