High resolution? Everything's just smaller..

Can anyone help me understand this "high resolution" concept Apply is employing in the Macbook Pros?


My understanding is that resolution has nothing to do with size, it's the amount of pixel information within a given size, no?


I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 17" with 1920 x 1200 resolution. Now I know the 17" is a fixed size, so I would expect everything to be the same size as my G4 17"—only at a higher resolution.


However, everything on my screen is tiny. Text , icon, pictures in my browser, icons in the tool bars of my programs—everything. I can't even read the text anymore, it's literally a problem working with my programs because there's nothing I can do to increase the size of the tools and dialog box text.. With my browser, obviously I can just increase the size with CMD-+, but I have to do it constantly, over and over, for every webpage (because it's not just the text.)


Then the best part is when I go to system preferences, all the other resolution options aren't the correct proportion for my screen! Choosing 1600x1200 for example, gives me a more square image space, with black vertical bars on the left and right side. Why is this even an option for me? Then there are the "stretched" resolutions which literally stretch the image area to fit the monitor. Everything is understandably distorted. THIS is an option!?


Higher resolution is nice when I'm working on my photographs or videos, but why does Apple attain this so-called higher resolution by simply making everything smaller? That's not resolution, that's SIZE.


Someone please enlighten me.


A

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 17" MacBok Pro Unibody (mid '09)

Posted on Sep 20, 2011 6:43 AM

Reply
20 replies

Oct 14, 2011 11:41 AM in response to allencraig

All the answers here are towing the Apple line ... and I like Apple and do not want to be that critical after Steve Jobs has left us ... but there are certain things that Apple just seems to get stuck on and refuse to address or even admit they perceive. This is one of them.


The display device ...

Besides the hoaky (but I am sure "somewhat" useful for people with visual impairments ) trick of magnifying the whole screen there is really nothing to make the whole screen or some part of it that the user, us, might have a problem with larger. There are many situations across devices that this is problematic for - iPad, iPhone, iMac, and my Mac Mini attached to my 1080P LCD display. Unless I get right up to the screen I cannot see what I need to see to use my Mac fully.


Applications:

The best example of this is the irritating kluge of clicking the screen magnification three time so I can read most of the "fixed" default small text on web pages. This could easily be solved by giving us a setting that will set the default magnification ... or I really should say scaling in Safari.


But there are other problems too, the tool-text pop-ups are often hard to read, certain part of mail, and particularly in non-Apple mail Apps like Thunderbird.


The fix for Safari is so easy that I would really appreciate it if Apple could implement that at least so we all do not have to wait for some imagined or hope for resolution-independent Mac OS - because in any OS I have ever seen that has been an elusive and maybe impossible to solve problem - at least if it is to be useful for the average non-PHD that is not on the Mac 7x24 hours a day.

Dec 29, 2016 10:01 PM in response to allencraig

i can only say that with a Mac, you have a video editing display that is no good for productivity or web browsing my friend it's just good for high razz video and images. As Mac has been crazed display resolution they have always forgotten to increase the size of the elements of the graphic interface accordingly. And so the text and the two buys have got smaller and smaller, and smaller, and smaller until people like you and me, find it unusable ( all five of my macs are relegated to the storeroom now I'm back on windows )


I have the same problem that the higher the resolution they are making, the screens the tinier everything is getting on the screen. I think that user interface designers are still using the same way of design, that they used when we only had 1040×700 pixels screens.


As displays increase the resolution, web designers and app designers continue to use the same stupid eight pixel font size. Most fonts on the computer it should be about minimum 16 pixels these days, to be able to read without straining your eyes, or getting long sighted.


i usually change screen resolution and bring it down to 1280 x720 px, thats the only way i can work on my mac. The higher resolution screen, the tiiiiiiiiiinier the Menu Bar and UI texts get. On my iMac 27, i cant use it at all, uhless i have *** iOad sized windows each with iphone sixe text arranged filling the screen.. if a 27 inch iMac screen only serves like six iPads next to each other and can only display tiny text then all you can have is a lot of tiny windows on a massive screen.


What I wanted was a massive browser open on a massive screen so I can sit 2 meters away on the sofa. But it doesn't work, because the screen resolution is so high that anybody except a professional video editor can't use it for normal purposes. These kind of screens are no good for web browsing. The best screens for web browsing and document editing other ones which they made 10 years ago were about 1400 pixels wide


I have become long sighted because of using Mac for the last five years .


I think everybody is going to end up long sighted, because it's happening with all devices. The manufacturers are going crazy to increase the resolution but they don't seem to realize that it's making everything on the screen get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, I actually have to use a magnifying glass to read some stuff if the pinch to zoom function has been deactivated. That's another thing Which nobody seems to have noticed; namely, that when pinch to zoom first came out as a feature all websites was zoomable using to fingerprints on the touchscreen. Now hardly any websites are zoomable using pinch to zoom.


I have actually been saying for days that I am going to go and buy a low resolution LCD or even TFT external display that's usually how I end up working with a Mac or even a Windows PC if the display is too high resolution. This is what I would suggest to you to that you buy a simple 1440×900 Or 1440 x 900 px resolution Old external TFT monitor. You will then be able to edit documents and surf the web very comfortably without the tiny text a fact. This is what I usually do when working at home. Lately I had to stop that because I bought an external display the assess MB 169+ which causes the computer to crash and can break the GPU, because the mission control causes a bug with the drivers for that external USB display. Don't buy one of those for a Mac ever. I spent $170 on that and it nearly broke my Mac


I would say just get a simple old LG external monitor with a low pixel density

that's what I do when I can't stand it anymore. I seriously wonder why Apple haven't noticed that the menu by on a 27 inch 5K iMac is something that requires a microscope to be able to even read the text on

Dec 29, 2016 11:38 PM in response to allencraig

I had some similar issue when I first got my Mac/iMac.

The screen was great, but everything got so small I could not read it.

I went to the System Preferences -> Displays screen.


If it is set for the default everything is very small,

However, if you go over to the scaled selection will

see how you can scale down your screen.


I have my 1900x1200 iMac screen actually running at 1344x840.

That works for me. It is not perfect, but it is usable without doing

a lot of tweaks every time I start something or switch apps.


Experiment, play around, you will find something you can live

with without throwing your Mac out.

Dec 30, 2016 11:15 AM in response to Thailand Amulets

Thailand Amulets wrote:




I would say just get a simple old LG external monitor with a low pixel density

that's what I do when I can't stand it anymore. I seriously wonder why Apple haven't noticed that the menu by on a 27 inch 5K iMac is something that requires a microscope to be able to even read the text on

allencraig hasn't been seen in these parts since this thread was last active in 2011. If you have an issue, you should start your own thread.

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High resolution? Everything's just smaller..

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