Retina Display MacBook Pro eye problem and strain

There are several reasons for eyestrain with an LCD display, but one of the less obvious ones is too high of a screen resolution! Your eyes focus on tiny, sharply defined edges in the center of their view. An older display (e.g., iPad 2) has big pixels that are defined by a black boarder around each pixel, and that has a sharp edge that you can focus on. With high resolution displays (Retina and others) your eye cannot see the pixel edge and so has nothing it can focus on. The pixel itself is too big and has soft and glowey edges and does not help you focus,

As an aside, if you look at an iPhone, the distance from the edge of the display (which you can focus on) to the center of the display is a very short distance and your eye will naturally see (or glance at) the edge of the display often enough to keep itself in focus even when looking at the center of the screen. With an iPad the screen is so big that you aren't normally aware of the edge and so your eye relies on the center of the screen for focus clues and there aren't any,

Fixes have been proposed:

Lower the brightness - this kind of works for lower resolution displays because it lowers the glowey (halation) and allows your eyes to see the pixel edge better, but it doesn't make much difference on the high res displays (unless the brightness is way out of adjustment).

Install a screen protector or security screen - These plastic screens have imperfections or actual visible features that your eye can focus on, so your eye stops trying to focus on the pixel and focuses on the imperfections in the plastic and uses that as a proxy for the focus point of the actual pixel. The more perfect the screen protector, the less effective it is in allowing you to focus on the screen.

This effect is not Apple-centric, it can be seen on the Nexus 7 and other high res displays and aside from the suggestions above, it is baked into high res screens. The effect may be reduced by the use of a mat display because you can see the texture of the mat surface and may be able to focus on it, but I have not done that experiment (i.e., sanding the front face of a glossy display)

The stobing of an LED backlight (which see the MacBook Pro) can create issues, but I think the above will be found to be the source of the many problems as we transistion to higher res displays.