Well, well. Look what those clever guys over at MacRumors.com found. Some interesting evidence of something big that could be in the works: Ultra High Resolution Displays.
According to Mac Rumors, it’s pretty simple. They write:
For those who have downloaded Apple’s Xcode for Lion, you can enable “HiDPI” mode in the Quartz Debug application found in the Developer directory. Once enabled, OS X’s Displays control panel offers additional 1/4 (and lower) resolution sizes as shown here on a 30″ Cinema Display with a native resolution of 2560×1600:
They go on to say: The 1280×800 HiDPI resolution shown here represents exactly 1/4 of the area of the native resolution of the 30″ Cinema Display and simply offers you a zoomed in view on present day monitors.
The reasoning is that when displays do reach ultra high resolutions and dots per inch (DPI), simply drawing the OS X interface as-is would result in very small interface elements. Apple’s solution is to scale all on-screen elements automatically by a factor of two (in each direction).
So, in the future, we might be using 2560×1600 (HiDPI) mode on a theoretical 30″ 5120×3200 pixel display. All user interface elements would stay the same size as today’s 30″ Cinema Display, but when available, higher resolution textures would be used to render the graphics. This is the same way that it worked when Apple transitioned from the original iPhone resolution to the iPhone 4’s retina display.
Too good to be true? Maybe if you’re hoping for something in the near future. But it’s pretty easy to imagine Apple’s working on bigger and better monitors—and no, sorry, we’re not talking about TV monitors…but that’s another article.