displaymacbook promacos
I'm in the process of downloading a rather chunky iMovie update (1.89 GB), and I'm wondering if the "Retina support" described about the update is something my non-retina MacBook must have lingering around?
I, like pretty much every other person, have a non-retina Mac and are these unused retina graphics are going to be present as inactive redundancies of all interface files/graphics in all retina supporting apps?
The retina display of the new iPad has both...
More vibrant colors will improve the looks of anything displayed on the screen. So this should make "non-retina compatible" games more fun as well.
However, all of the iOS apps by Apple are in high-res and due to the huge difference in the used pixels, non-retina apps will appear to have worse graphics.
The retina display is theoratically able to display four times the content. Apps that make use of only 1/4 of the pixel resolution are perceived less detailed.
Applications using standard Cocoa APIs should get retina text for free.
This was the same way it was released with the iPhone 4 in iOS. If you used standard UIKit, you basically got it all for free, and just had to update resources, etc.
So, with a Retina MBP as of right now, many apps need to add @2X resources (for things like images, etc), but otherwise standard applications should render all other content as retina.
Best Answer
Yes, retina optimized apps will typically ship with both versions of graphics.
You can easily have a look at the retina graphic files yourself by viewing the package contents of the app. They should be located in AppName.app/Contents/Resources. At least for the Apple ones, the retina versions seem to have '@2x' appended to their base name, for example badge-info-N@2x.tiff is the retina version of badge-info-N.tiff.
While you probably could delete these files, it probably isn't a good idea as it will break the code signing, which in it's turns makes KeyChain access impossible without signing the code again, for example.
As to how much overhead or 'burden' the retina graphics are, I had a quick look at iPhoto.app (I don't have iMovie installed). In total, the retina graphics seems to add about 10% to the total app size (or in iPhoto's case, about 124MB). I think for a typical user, when most apps are retina-optimized (not sure when/if that will happen), this will not amount to more than 1GB in total.