With Apple’s release of the brand new MacBook Pro with Retina screen on Monday, many people are sitting on the fence wondering if they should purchase the computer or wait. It sounds like waiting may be the best option available to you at this point. Adobe and Autodesk, both featured during the WWDC keynote, have Retina apps coming down the pipeline, but neither company will be releasing anything until “later this year.” The question now is whether or not “later this year” is going to be a typical wait time while developers move to update their apps to include Retina graphics.
In both cases, company officials have stated that they plan on releasing the apps, but a lot more testing needs to be done before either company release updates. Rob Maguire, Autodesk’s product manager for AutoCAD, told Macworld, “Maguire said his company needed to test the updated app on the new MacBook Pro, which it had only limited access to until recently. One particular concern for Autodesk is making sure that users with multi-monitor setups can drag an AutoCAD window from a Retina display to a standard-definition display and back again, without bugs cropping up.”
Professional apps may take a while to make it into the App Store and on to the Mac, but independent, smaller development houses should be able to turn their apps into Retina-ready applications in substantially less time.
Word to the wise, expect everything to look a little blurry and jagged for a while. It could be some time before all of your daily applications take advantage of the new Retina display in the MacBook Pro. Most apps got updated for the new iPad’s Retina screen pretty quickly. But, if you spend most of your time surfing the Internet, Retina-ready websites may take a lot longer to roll out updates. We’re probably looking at a substantial amount of time until the Internet is mostly Retina-ready. That time is probably going to be measured in years, not months or days. CSS and HTML based websites will be up to snuff already, but any site that makes use of images or photographs will need serious updates before they look as crisp as they can on your shiny new Retina MacBook Pro. If you’re fine with that, then pull the trigger. You won’t be disappointed. I’m waiting though.
When you take into account that it could be upwards of six to eight months until we see major apps like Photoshop or AutoCAD get Retina-ready, there’s probably a good chance the new Retina MacBook Pro will be heading towards a spec refresh around that time, making the upgrade a smoother transition.
Apple’s facing a large uphill battle in its attempt to Retina-ify the World Wide Web, and it’s going to be interesting to see if the competition moves to create their own lines of “Retina” monitors to compete with Apple. If Samsung, HP, Dell, and every other personal computing company begins making Retina monitors, there’s no doubt that the Internet will be Retina ready a lot quicker than it would be if Apple’s the only guy on the market with the wares needed to experience the web in all of its pixel goodness.
Source: Macworld
