>As can be seen on the 13" retina MacBook Pro, Apple is willing to make icky tradeoffs in favour of less logical resolution (despite being their top of the line 13" it has a lower logical resolution than the non-retina 13" MacBook Air).
The 13" MacBook has always 1280x800, so it wasn't really a tradeoff. The Air is the higher DPI version and has been all along.
Well, yeah, but the 13" resolution has been an embarrassment for a long, long time. It just made no sense, especially compared to the Air.
I think it’s a quite obvious tradeoff, Apple just decided on it early on so it’s not as noticeable. (They must have known for quite some time that retina screens were coming so they kept the 13" Pro at a level where they could feasibly quadruple the pixels in the short run.)
That’s my little conspiracy theory for the day, and anyway, the logical resolution of the 13" Pro is an embarrassment. That’s just how it is. It’s a very real tradeoff (you get higher res for less logical resolution than is usual at that size).
The 13" MacBook has always 1280x800, so it wasn't really a tradeoff. The Air is the higher DPI version and has been all along.