I believe folks have already seen evidence in OSX that Apple will be doing "retina" displays for laptops and desktops. Continued movement towards a resolution-independent OS.
Actually, I see this as the abandonment of resolution independence. Apple has always been about pixel-perfect graphics, and that's quite hard to do with vector assets. Fonts have to have all sorts of hinting to get single-pixel risers and joins to look decent. That's one of the reasons that fonts are so costly – now imagine that all your graphics require that level of care. Making pixel-perfect "@2x" graphics is much easier.
Then again, maybe those hints are only necessary because of the limitations of low resolution displays. If each pixel is barely large enough to be discerned by the naked eye, single-pixel accuracy may not matter so much. Clearly resolution independence is still desirable for accessibility reasons, even at the end of the pixel density road.
Actually, I see this as the abandonment of resolution independence.
I was thinking the same thing. It's amusing to think that Apple found resolution independence harder than waiting for/making panels quadruple in size. Certainly good for marketing though :)
Even if you want to move towards resolution independence, when you have a huge universe of apps at a particular resolution, simply doubling the screen size is the easiest way to let them migrate with minimal pain. It's a lot easier to tell them that the _minimum_ thing they have to do is double their measurements than force them to jump entirely over to a non-pixel-based regime. At the same time you can start introducing resolution-independent UX for new apps.
