"but it won’t be long before Retina Cinema Displays replace their outdated siblings"
I was honestly surprised with each retina release by Apple starting with the IPhone4. After the initial “aww” of it had passed, it was easier to wrap your head around its production due to its relatively small screen. Now we have 15” macbook pro’s with retina. Apple released a professional production machine for its retina ecosystem to thrive to aid its consumer mobile devices experience. This is exciting for us power users and geeks for sure.
A retina thunderbolt display(twenty seven inch), seems like quite a technological hurdle,. How much will you pay? $2000 for the screen? They could release such a product, again for professionals, to service professionals creating the content for their other devices to consume. You will pay for it though.
Does the average kitchen need retina imacs and will the market speak?
Does the average kitchen need a 21" screen, 2.5GHz quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive? (That's the base iMac.)
Does the average garage need a 4x4 SUV with cruise control, climate control, 6-disc CD, sat nav, heated seats, flip down DVD screens, etc. etc. ?
Of course not.
The developed world stopped caring long ago about what average people "need", and has long since focused on what people "want". Or at least what advertising can convince us we "want", before we even know we do.
Sadly, I think retina iMacs are further away than we'd like to hope. Eizo has a 36 inch 4K monitor for $35,000¹. There's a 31 inch 4K Viewsonic Monitor for an undisclosed price². Even that's only 150dpi. If Apple wants to make a pixel doubled 27 inch iMac for under 10K, I'd be surprised it if they could do it by 2013.
But then again, I thought the retina MacBook Pro was impossible. So perhaps I'm not the best judge of these things.
But the Retina MBP is already past that resolution on a 15" screen (2880x1800). If "Retina" means 2x the standard resolution, we'd need 24" monitors at 3840x2400 and 27" monitors at 5120x2880. I wonder if even Thunderbolt could drive that.
"" - If a 27” Retina Display is a “2X” version of the current panel, that’s a 5120x2880 panel — running that at 60 Hz requires more bandwidth (over 21 Gbps for 24-bit color) than Thunderbolt offers today (up to two 10 Gbps channels).""
These screens are insanely expensive, and wouldn't make much sense. Nobody is looking at 27" monitors from such a small distance to distinguish between retina and simply good resolution.
Plus, I don't think there are affordable video cards to drive resolutions like 5120x2880.
Well, you make a good point. For comparison, my 17" MBP is at 133 ppi (1920x1200), while the base 15" is 110 ppi, and so the Retina 15" is 220 ppi. If you wanted the 17" screen to be around 220 ppi, you could go with 3072x1920, which would noticeably easier to make and to drive than 3840x2400. Given that full-size screens are usually viewed from farther away than laptop screens, I think it's fair to offer this as a "Retina" resolution for a 24" 8:5 screen.
Similarly, the 27" 16:9 screen could come in at maybe 3584x2016.
I was honestly surprised with each retina release by Apple starting with the IPhone4. After the initial “aww” of it had passed, it was easier to wrap your head around its production due to its relatively small screen. Now we have 15” macbook pro’s with retina. Apple released a professional production machine for its retina ecosystem to thrive to aid its consumer mobile devices experience. This is exciting for us power users and geeks for sure.
A retina thunderbolt display(twenty seven inch), seems like quite a technological hurdle,. How much will you pay? $2000 for the screen? They could release such a product, again for professionals, to service professionals creating the content for their other devices to consume. You will pay for it though.
Does the average kitchen need retina imacs and will the market speak?