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Comment by swframe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if apple will prevent rendering at full resolution like the retina macbook pros because the max font/icon size for many apps is too small. This would mean you are paying for a screen that can't render at the new fancy resolution because the resulting info would be too small to resolve by most people.

Many computer users suffer from eye strain because they have to stare to resolve the information; their eyes dry and then each blink causes tiny scratches which over time causes serious damage.

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Do you know what else reduces eye strain? Sharp text rendering.

Ctrl+F'd in this thread for "eye strain" to see if anyone else reports oddly having more eye strain from using a retina screen.

I used a 15" macbook pro retina for 2 years pretty much 8 hours a day and noticed my eye sight deteriorating rapidly. I thought it was just the hours I was logging in front of a computer screen and thought 'well atleast I'm using a retina screen'. But now that I've stopped using the macbook and have moved to an old 20" lcd screen and working on Windows 7, I find that my eyesight has recovered significantly. I can read road signs and my ability to change focus has improved.

I'm not sure what the explanation could be but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that your eyes are actually more stressed when they try to resolve the denser retina pixels.

Any one have any insight?

The point of a retina display is that the eye perceives it as continuous shapes and gradations of colour and tone.

It's more likely to be down to the size of fonts and visual elements. Would you say the font sizes you viewed on the MBP were smaller or larger than those on the 20" display? (As perceived by you, not necessarily as displayed on the screen as viewing distance is also a factor). It may be the smaller screen size caused you to zoom out of content to fit more on the screen. That would have a far grater impact on eye strain.

The fact that smaller text would be crisp and readable on a retina display may have encouraged you to zoom out more than you might do on a lower resolution display though, so the retina display isn't totally off the hook as a contributing factor.

> The fact that smaller text would be crisp and readable on a retina display may have encouraged you to zoom out more than you might do on a lower resolution display though, so the retina display isn't totally off the hook as a contributing factor.

Thanks for the reply, yea I think this is the most likely culprit. Though, looking at the font size of Xcode right now it doesn't seem to be any smaller than this text I'm typing on my 20" monitor. At one point a year into working on the macbook I thought it could have been the brightness so I did change my Xcode background to black and used a program called 'flux' to reduce my screens brightness but it really didn't offer much relief.

Does your old 20" lcd screen have a CCFL backlight?

For some reason unknown to me, the light emitted by the LED backlight in my life (in an iPad 2) tend to cause a little unpleasant tension in me, but the CCFL backlights in my life (in an HP w2007 monitor and in a Samsung LN32A450 television set) do not.

(All MBPRs have LED backlights.)

They don't prevent rending at full resolution it's just disabled by default. You can switch it on in system preferences.

Please backup your claim with a link that shows how.

This is an example of all the sites that I've found: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pr...

It says ...

One size that Apple does not offer is the actual native resolution of each display, no doubt because icons, text and other interface elements are too small for just about anyone to read.

In any event, the issue is customers should check if this product will actually render the full 5k resolution without hacking and if it is usable at the resolution. It is abusive to sell a product with a spec that you can't actually use. But Apple is all about form over function.

Thank golly space and pixels are not the same thing; you can always render more pixels in the same amount of space, keeping your UI quite usable and even improved, since rendering the same vector in 400 pixels will look much better compared to rendering it with 100 pixels.

> It is abusive to sell a product with a spec that you can't actually use.

Ya, if pixels and space were the same thing, Apple should be sued! Thankfully they aren't.

> But Apple is all about form over function.

Because good looking rendering of vectors and fonts is only about form and doesn't improve function. For sure. </sarcasm>

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