When Apple started the Retina Display ball rolling with high-resolution updates to its catalog, we eagerly headed over to the App Store to grab the latest and greatest versions of our favorite iWork and iLife apps. But as we waited for the little blue progress bars to disappear, we couldn't help but notice how much longer they took to complete. Just last night, it took over half an hour to download a 750mb app over Wi-Fi.
In order to display those high resolution applications and have them look supreme on the Retina Display, the images have to get bigger, which means that the size of the apps have to go up, too. Pages went from 95.1 MB to 269 MB, and Numbers and Keynote packed on quite a few megabytes. What's worse: if you're updating these apps on the first-generation iPad or an iPad 2, they're taking up all the space on your device and you can't even take advantage of the fact that they're high resolution.