Gratitude Day 25: Pixels

As I was delightscrolling through the fediverse today, I came across this post with a close-up photo of a Palm IIIc synchronizing some email, and it made me realize how much I missed low-resolution displays. I'm thinking about how the rarity of a thing can increase its value, such as with diamonds (which are a huge racket), as they are actually not that rare, but production is tightly controled by a near-monopoly to keep the prices very high. And somehow, I think we appreciated pixels more when we had fewer of them. I still remember when the iPhone 4 came out with its insane 326 ppi "retina" display: higher resolution than first-generation laser printers! That was my first iPhone (and really my first true smartphone), and I marveled at its screen, and how incredibly crisp everything looked. You couldn't hardly see the pixels, no matter how hard you looked! But now, high DPI displays are becoming very commonplace, and even where we don't have particularly high dpi displays (like some…