Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the new MacBook Pro 2012 with its higher resolution Retina Display could increase consumption of network bandwidth. However in a new post entitled “correction” they have retracted this and are now saying that in fact higher resolution screens in themselves use more bandwidth. So does the 2012 MacBook Pro Retina model use more bandwidth or not?
New MacBook Pro Retina 2012 models may lead to increased data usage
The updates to the MacBook Pro were announced at the WWDC and come with a Retina display with a resolution of 2880x1800 pixels with a 15.4 inch display. This is one of the crispest screens ever seen on a laptop. Some analysts have said that owners of the laptop might use them at work which could cause havoc with budgets as they might use more bandwidth due to the fact that they may watch more HD videos on their devices.
This comes following news that employees using the latest iPad with the retina display of 2054x1536 with 3.1 million pixels are likely to download high quality video content to make use of the display, which in turn, could slow down networks and increase the company’s data costs with carriers. The answer to this could be following the likes of Google and other companies who give their employees a monthly bill for IT services that they consume.
On a side note, from a consumers point of view we could also see MacBook Pro 2012 users consumer more data as well given that some websites show different assets depending on the display resolution of the devices it is shown on. This is actually a very well known issue among web developers in serving the correct assets depending on the pixel density of the display. Take for instance the Apple.com website: "The total size of the [Apple.com] page goes from 502.90K to 2.13MB when the retina versions of images are downloaded," explains CloudFour. Of course, this won't apply to all websites on the Web as many developers wouldn't care about serving different quality content depending on the resolution of the screen of its visitors.
