That last post regarding the Lenovo IdeaPad got me thinking about something that has been a burr under my saddle for close to a year now: PC/tablet display technology.
The problem I have is that both Apple and Microsoft have taken operating systems that were clearly designed to look best on 15"+ displays and shoe-horned them onto small laptops to the point that you're forced to strain your eyes to even see what you're doing. Sure, you can lower the screen resolution but that just makes everything blurry. You can also (in some cases) increase the DPI scale but then you run into issues with third party app compatibility.
I haven't had a chance to demo Windows RT or 8 so maybe this is a problem Microsoft has attempted to address, but I can honestly say that it's still a problem with Apple's hardware.
For example, if you measure the screen width and height of both the iPad and the 11" MacBook Air, the numbers are very close. For some reason though (most likely related to the touch-interface), Apple has decided that the Mac OS is not suited for use on a tablet. I would argue there's an even better reason why a tablet would need its own OS.
Case in point: I don't normally hold a laptop screen as close to my face as I would a tablet and I'm guessing most other people don't either. And while the iPad is designed to be held closer to your face, its OS consists of big buttons and fairly large text. The 11" Air on the other hand, runs exactly the same OS found on the 27" iMac. Beginning to see the problem?
As an experiment I cut cardboard templates to match roughly the height and width measurements of both the 11" Air and the 27" iMac.
I measured the distance that a laptop's screen would normally sit from my face - about 22".
I then jammed a yardstick through the Air's template, slid the template in to the 22" mark on the stick, then held the zero end of the yardstick up to my face.
While holding the contraption in this position, I began walking toward the iMac's template which was taped to the wall. As soon as the Air's template barely covered the iMac's from view, I stopped and guesstimated the distance between the iMac template and my face. The distance was at least 10" beyond the 36" yardstick!
So to my eyes, the MacBook Air's 11" screen (while sitting in my lap or on my desk) looks roughly the same size as a 27" iMac at 45-50" away!
But here's my point: aside from maybe watching a movie, who the heck sits 45-50" away from their monitor - even when it's a big 27-incher? So why do we tolerate small-screen laptops running desktop OSes, that provide the equivalent experience of trying to work on a desktop PC from four feet away?
Apple has proven with iOS that they are capable of building a very usable OS that works well on devices with small displays. The question is, why haven't they incorporated a more powerful version of iOS into their sub-15" MacBooks? It's clear that Apple, Microsoft and Google all feel that a desktop OS has no place on tablets and smartphones. I would simply add that for comfort and eye health, it has no place on a sub-15" laptop either.
Of course much of this is subjective but the fact that these guys are giving separate operating systems to tablets that have screens nearly identical in size to their smallest laptops opens the door for criticism in my opinion. And the march toward high pixel density displays seems in some ways like trying to slap a band-aid over a bullet wound. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that pricey, battery-draining high density displays like Apple's Retina technology might not be so essential if the design of the OS interface didn't require us to squint, strain and get so close to the monitor that individual pixels stuck out like sore thumbs.
