There is nothing silly no gimmicky about it.
It is just a catchy name for some technology. There are a lot of similar marketing terms in tech.
Lots more people will understand what you are talking about when you say "retina display" instead of "high-DPI display".
What's high-DPI? What's high-DPI when talking about pentile displays? Not to mention that "retina" is easier to pronounce.
Apple loves simpler names for a reason.
No, it's a gimmick designed expressly to confuse the consumer. Other manufacturers of comparable products, for trademark reasons, can't use the term "retina". So only Apple has "retina".
Intel played a similar trick about 8 years ago with "Centrino". The advertising (for what was essentially just a 802.11b chipset with some added processor/chipset requirements) was so successful that many novice users got fooled into thnking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
> many novice users got fooled into thinking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
Really? Both the claim that many users were "fooled" by the Centrino branding and that this hurt the market for Wi-Fi devices seem highly implausible to me. I don't think I heard anyone use the term "Centrino" outside of Intel PR and reporting thereupon, whereas Wi-Fi had made it into the vernacular at least a decade ago.
The only other trademark for the 802.11 series of standards that got any traction at all was Apple's AirPort, and even their OS calls it Wi-Fi now.
Yes, really. I had to explain to numerous relatives the distinction between "Centrino" and "Wifi". How old are you? Were you engaged with people who were actively buying laptops at the time? Were you engaged on the subject outside the tech community? The Centrino television ads were pervasive, everyone knew what they were about, and no one at the time had ever heard of a laptop that could get on the internet without a wire.
(edit: your remark about AirPort makes this clearer on reflection: you were a mac user at the time, and familiar with Apple products much more than PCs. Outside the mac world, as you might expect, literally no one had heard of an "AirPort". So you were insulated from Intel's nonsense, essentially.)
It's the same thing here. We have "retina.js" being pushed around as a solution for what is clearly a manufacturer-independent problem. Yet on it's face it appears to be Apple-only software. You don't think that constitutes harm to the market?
> The Centrino television ads were pervasive, everyone knew what they were about, and no one at the time had ever heard of a laptop that could get on the internet without a wire.
Apple introduced laptops with Wi-Fi (calling it "AirPort") in 1999, five years before your "eight years ago". Starbucks first started rolling out Wi-Fi (calling it "Wi-Fi")in 2001, and had most of their stores offering it by 2003. It was not an obscure technology eight years ago.
I'm sure whenever non-geeks go shopping for a computer, in any era, there are a variety of marketing terms that need to be explained to them. And yes, I'm old enough to have run through that exercise a few times. But that's not really evidence that "Centrino" hurt the growth of Wi-Fi any more than the way-more-prevalent "Pentium" branding hurt the '90-'00's highly competitive CPU market that gave us 2+GHz x86-64's.
Wi-Fi adoption rates were exceptional for a new computing technology, especially one that required infrastructure beyond what could be put "in the box".
Just like Apple was a couple of years ahead of the curve on Wi-Fi and called it AirPort, they're a couple of years ahead of the curve on double-res displays, too. I don't see how them putting the name "Retina" on those displays (while even in the OS they're still calling it Hi-DPI!) is going to harm what's surely going to be an explosion of high resolution screens in the next few years.
Really. I worked as a laptop salesman when Intel introduced the term "Centrino". I had to explain to many customers that yes, this other laptop that happened not to use an Intel chipset also worked wirelessly.
To get a Centrino sticker, a laptop had to use an Intel chipset, Intel wireless adapter and Intel CPU. Because the marketing for Centrino focussed almost exclusively on Wifi capability, there were many laptops with non-Intel chipsets or AMD CPUs that were perceived by customers as not being capable of wireless networking.
This article[1] explains how Wi-Fi wasn't very popular until the Centrino campaign.
That's essentially an Intel press release (follow the author link).
Anyway, I'm perfectly content to believe that Centrino and Intel's multimillion dollar marketing campaign for it really helped the growth of Wi-Fi. The parent post claimed the opposite: That the branding "hurt the market" for Wi-Fi, which seems absurd.
I fail to see your point. All companies give trademarked names to their products, and to specific features of their products (especially the features that are used heavily in marketing).
Apple is welcome to give any name they want to their product. But when they confuse users to the extent that otherwise-smart web developers start producing "retina.js" to manage resolution independent images (hardly an Apple-specific problem!) then the practice has gone too far.
