The Problem With The Macbook Pro's Retina Display

It's disappointing that Apple didn't include some obvious retina friendly system preferences. System font size, ui scaling, true native retina resolution, etc.

That said I think the sky is falling impression here is overblown:

"It means my Retina display, while being 125% sharper than my the HD display on my Sony, has 44% less screen space!"

Isn't this only true if 100% of your screen is taken up by ui elements from non-updated applications? Isn't this the sort of problem that's common with early adoption?

"What it does is render the whole screen at a different resolution, say 1920×1200, and then scale it up, using the graphics hardware, to 2880×1800! This means everything gets blurred. I.e. I get less crispness than a native 1920×1200 display would give me."

There are third party apps that will display at true 2880 x 1800:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/18/3-ways-to-run-a-retina-macboo...

You can run at true 2880x1800 using switchresx. http://www.madrau.com/indexSRX4.html

Thing is, this resolution is not really usable as everything becomes too small. I personally think the way apple did it makes perfect sense. Increase pixel density & sharpness while retaining the size of UI elements.

"What it does is render the whole screen at a different resolution, say 1920×1200, and then scale it up, using the graphics hardware, to 2880×1800! This means everything gets blurred. I.e. I get less crispness than a native 1920×1200 display would give me."

No, it does nothing of the sort. It renders the whole screen at 3840x2160 and scales it DOWN to 2880x1800. As a result everything designed for retina is razor sharp. Everything that is standard resolution is blurry, but no more so than when running at 1440x900 equivalent.

I run 1920x1200 equiv. on my rMPB all day. I even run Adobe CS6 on it. No problems. Seriously, all the complaining I've heard about "unusable" Adobe products on this machine are bunk. It hasn't effected my photo editing, or page layout work even a tiny bit. I don't use MS Office much, which is indeed blurry at any resolution, but LibreOffice is sharp.

Thanks heaps for the helpful links. I had googled for solutions before writing that rant but couldn't find anything.

I ended up using Change Resolution (http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?pos...) to do what I needed.