http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/3.1.8_lisa.html http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html
Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.
Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.
I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.
If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?
For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly. Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly. The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons. Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale factor.
Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.
World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login screen on the other three quarters.
Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior defects.
Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.
