Incredible Comparison Images With The Original Mac Put The New iPad’s Retina Display In Perspective

Gizmodo’s resident PhotoShop freak and controversy-stirrer extraordinaire Jesus Diaz has posted up a fantastic couple of images putting into perspective just how frickin’ densely packed the new iPad’s 3+ million pixels really are.

In the image above, a new iPad is placed right next to a vintage Macintosh. The idea here is that if the pixels of the vintage Mac and the new iPad were exactly the same size, the iPad would have to be positively Brobdingnagian to accommodate all of them.

And that’s not all.

To the left, the entire real estate of a vintage MacOS desktop screen. To the right, Camera+ 3.0’s new app. The new app icon has more pixels than the whole vintage MacOS screen!

If you’d told me that one day, there’d be a computer the size of a magazine that could connect to the Internet wirelessly, have ten hours of battery life, be controlled by touch and voice alone and which would have a screen resolution 18 times greater than the Mac I was using at the time, I would have called you a filthy liar and arranged to have your thumbnails slowly removed. I’m from Winter Hill, after all.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.