Apple Upgrading Site Images For iPad Retina Display

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retina-120313.jpg

Apple is retina-izing its web graphics

Apple is quietly and diligently working behind the scenes to make sure its website looks great on the new hi-res iPads which will begin to drop onto our doormats this weekend. To get ready for the never-seen-before ten-inch retina display, Apple is swapping in higher resolution graphics.

The iPhone has had a retina display for well over a year now but because it has a very small screen compared to even the smallest notebook, images were never zoomed enough to look jaggedy. The iPad, with its crazy three and a half million pixels, won’t be so forgiving. Thus, Apple is adding double-resolution images to the site.

Apple Insider reader dglow first noticed the changes, and says that the new files have a “2x” suffix in their names. Thus, ipad_hero.png becomes ipad_hero_x2.png.

He also says that the regular images are loaded first, and then the hi-res versions load afterwards. This fits my testing. When I do an Inspect Elements in Chrome, only the regular images are showing up. Even when I spoof the browser user agent in Safari and pretend to be an iPad, I still only see regular graphics.

I guess the new iPad will identify itself as such, and the rest of us plebs on our outdated screens will continue to suffer. At least we won’t get hit by the slower loading times, though.

[Via Apple Insider]

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