text/font is TOO SMALL TO READ

That's the way Apple's OS has always been. Unlike the active (resolution independent) desktop introduced in Windows '95, the Mac OS has never had such a desktop.

I do know what you mean. If I have Win 10 on a 4K monitor, it automatically adjusts the entire OS to use larger type and application boxes to produce a relatively easy to see and read GUI. And you can still adjust almost everything to your liking.

Apple's OS can't do that, and never has been able to. There are a fixed number of point sizes in an app. Older apps only had one. So the only way to increase or shrink the size of such an app is to change the overall display resolution. Newer apps can have up to three (I believe) text sizes built into them be the developer. The OS then automatically pick the point size it thinks is best relative to the current display resolution.

Or, the app will let you manually choose a preset. Such as here in Photoshop:

But even those are fixed by Adobe (or any Mac app with such a preference option). You can only choose predetermined sizes. You cannot adjust them at will.

So, using 4K on a 4K monitor will always produce a teeny tiny GUI. Your only control otherwise is in System Settings > Accessibility:

And the Text size choice (at least for now) is limited to a handful of apps.

All the answers to this are just evasion. It's ignoring a problem that can be easily fixed. Talk to a real coder and they'll just laugh and laugh. I'm not sure why Apple continues to ignore this. They allow you to scale normal and larger, but stop there. There are probably just too few people complaining for them to put the time and resources into it. It's like when they focused on Apple Pay instead of inductive charging. There was obviously a financial incentive to develop the former.

By the way, even if you had infinite resolution, there would be an inherent tradeoff between

• The physical size of a monitor,
• How much stuff (text strings, objects) you could cram onto that monitor (workspace),
• How far you sat from the monitor, and
• The physical size and readability of that stuff (text strings, objects)

Think about it.

Commercial printing presses typically have much higher resolution than computer monitors, and yet you do not see publishers printing most paper books using 3-point fonts so as not to "waste the resolution" of the printing presses and paper.

I'm using a 27" 4K monitor with Ventura 3.1. In Displays Preferences, it shows me five choices ranging from Larger Text to More Space. In System Settings, I can see the "UI Looks like" and (drawing canvas) "Resolution".

Larger Text = Resolution 3840x2160, UI Looks like 1920x1080. The monitor says that it sees a 3840x2160 signal. The next notch = Resolution 5120x2880, UI Looks like 2560x1440. On this setting, the monitor also tells me that it sees a 3840x2160 signal. (The Mac is downscaling from the 5K drawing canvas to the 4K screen.)

Neither setting is "deliberate crippling of the monitor." The Mac is using the higher resolution of the monitor – just not to cram more, and more, tiny stuff onto the screen.

This may not be the way that Windows does it – but in this case, Apple was the one who showed more concern for backwards compatibility. Say that you were using the "5120x2880" / "UI Looks like 2560x1440" setting. A legacy, non-Retina-aware application that believed that the only use for extra pixels was to cram more and more stuff onto the screen would see the "2560x1440". It would draw at that resolution and the OS would double the actual pixel dimensions / placement behind its back, so it would run correctly despite "not knowing the real deal."

A Retina-aware application would see that it could fill in photo areas at twice the normal detail – and would provide that detail to the operating system. The OS would draw letter shapes more precisely.

The net result would be to use the higher resolution of the display – but to put the work of doing so on the newer, Retina-aware applications, and on the OS, instead of on legacy applications. My impression is that when hi-DPI resolution displays were fairly new, a lot of Windows users ran into problems where applications did not honor the scaling controls, and so their output became unusably small. The Mac system may seem roundabout – but it let Macs take advantage of high-resolution screens with fewer legacy application problems.

These days, just about every Mac application is Retina-aware.

The real purpose of 4K is not to cram more things on a display to make them very tiny but to make what is displayed much sharper and clearer. So, when viewing the display with content at 2K on a 4K screen it will be sharper and clearer that when viewed on a 2K screen. And in the case of Apple's video rendering it is improved even more since internally the display would be at 5K and then optimized to be viewed at 2K when delivered to the display.

BaldwinMark wrote:

All the answers to this are just evasion.

Nope.

I'm not sure why Apple continues to ignore this. They allow you to scale normal and larger, but stop there.

Nope. My Mac lets me run a 27" 4K monitor in "like 3008x1692" and "like 3360x1890" – both of which, on a 27" monitor, result in text being smaller than normal. Where normal is defined by the size of text on a 27" 2560x1440 monitor running in non-scaled mode. That size is somewhat smaller than the size of text on a 24" 1080p monitor.

Handling high-PPI displays is a case where Apple put more effort into ensuring backwards compatibility with older applications than Microsoft did. If you set a scaling factor of 150% or 200% on Windows and an older application ignores it – which I believe many did in the early days of high-PPI displays – you just have to live with bad results. On the Mac, if you had a 5120x2880 display running in Retina "like 2560x1440" mode, a legacy application would believe the display actually had 2560x1440 pixels, and the OS would transparently map drawing calls so that you would see things at the expected size and place on the display.

In Retina "UI looks like 2560x1440" mode, Retina-aware applications can fill in detail at 5120x2880 pixel level. On a 27" Retina iMac screen or a 27" Apple 5K Studio Display, this exactly matches the LCD panel's native resolution of 5120x2880 pixels.

For a 4K monitor, the contents of the 5K canvas are downscaled to 4K to fit onto the screen. Note carefully that the Mac is downscaling from a higher resolution than the screen has, rather than simply sending some low-resolution signal to the monitor, for the monitor to do "digital zoom."

This is what people who don't understand how the Retina system works consistently miss.

It's also what bashers love to seize upon, to claim that the Mac doesn't take advantage of high-resolution screens, when in fact, it does.

Variable font sizes for the OS were rumored back in Tiger, 10.4, still no show, the only "answer" is to reduce the resolution... maybe a second monitor for the Menus & such?

Brand new MacBook PRO and this setting DOES NOT WORK. Worked once then it reverted to super small and will not change no matter what I change this setting to. SO ANNOYING

I mentioned several settings. Please be more specific.