Why do people insist on using Apple marketing terms for what are commodity components? It's a ~300DPI LCD. Apple didn't invent it, they just bought it from someone. Ditto for all the people talking about the performance of the "A5 CPU".
Apple actually made a worthwhile distinction with "retina display" - it's the resolution at which the human eye can't discern different pixels from the distances it will be used at. Simply noting the DPI doesn't capture this. Some argue that since the iPad is often held further away, it could have lower DPI than the iPhone and still have indiscernible pixels.
"300dpi iPad confirmed" would have been clearer, more correct, less marketing polluted, and fit within the same number of message bytes. Believe it or not there are people in the world outside Apple's products who understand dots per inch but not what a "retina" display is.
Say what you will about Apple polluting the landscape with marketing speak, but I think there's semantic value in thinking of it as a simple high-res display instead of a "300dpi LCD". Talking about it as a 300dpi display focuses on the technical implementation; calling it "retina" shifts the focus to the practical advantage, which is "it looks a lot better".
Unless you're a developer, it doesn't make a lick of difference to you whether it's 300dpi or 302dpi. What matters is that the display is either "pixelly" or "not pixelly". "Retina" may be a silly-sounding name, but I think the idea is just fine.
Would you apply it to other devices then? Do the Galaxy Nexus or Droid RAZR have "Retina Displays"? Clearly not, because that's an Apple trademark. So I don't see what your point is. The apple-only term would be better than the generic if it wasn't an apple-only term. Well, sure.
I just don't understand the desire on the part of Apple fans to embrace what are transparent attempts at rebranding generic components. In a non-technical environment sure. But on Hacker News? Really?
There are two issues here: leaving out levels of technical implementation detail ("I don't care about the specific DPI of the display, just that it's higher than before"), and using Apple-coined phrases to do so ("retina" rolls off the tongue much more nicely than "very high-density").
I'm not sure whether you were originally taking offense at the first, the second, or both; how would you feel if instead of talking about 'retina displays' people just said that the iPad 3 would have a 'higher-density screen'?
(as a sidenote, Android technically does have an equivalent shorthand for the various pixel densities the OS supports, but I don't know of any Android manufacturers who actively advertise a "XHDPI" display)
Switch brands to escape the reality distortion field and maybe it will be clearer: Do you call your wireless networking adapter a "Centrino"? That was also a very successful (at the time) attempt to rebrand a generic standard into something that was sold by only one manufacturer. Lots of people in the early days of WiFi walked into stores asking for one of those "Centrino" computers that could get to the internet without wires. And they'd refuse to buy one without the sticker even if it had a perfectly good radio.
See the damage this nonsense can do? And you'd never buy into it from any vendor except Apple, where for reasons I can't understand otherwise smart people get suckered into thinking Apple designs innovative CPUs and LCD panels.
