"This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this."
Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.
I might be mistaken, but I believe he's referring specifically to bonding the LCD display to a capacitive piece of glass, rather than just regular protective plastic.
(Does Samsung use glass in their displays? They all look plastic to me.)
No, it's not glass vs. plastic he's talking about (and yes Samsung Super-AMOLED screens are glass anyway). The original poster is correct, Gruber believes this reduction in layers above the screen was pioneered by Apple because they made it seem like they did in their introductory videos and thinks it unique because he neither knows nor cares about things happening outside the sphere of Apple. He doesn't even just say that it doesn't exist (which is of course not true), he says it couldn't exist outside Apple because no-one else cares.
The OpenMoko phone also had a higher number of pixels-per-inch than the iPhone 4. And this was years ago, by a no-name hardware company.
The reason other phones don't have a "retina display" is because it's expensive, and the other phones are trying to win market share by being cheap. Sadly, this works better than making a quality product.
Given the retinal indifference threshold of 287ppi@12inches, which was given in a recent HN-linked and praised article, 282ppi only needs to be a 1/4 inch further out for the pixels to fall into retinal indifference. Pretty nice for a 2008 phone.
Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.