I see that the MacBook Pro Retina has a nifty resolution scaling feature that can make the fonts/icons look bigger while maintaining the display's native resolution.
Does the non-Retina MBP have the same ability? I would really like to be able to scale by 125% (fonts/icons appear 125% bigger) while keeping native resolution of 1440x900.
I'm setting up a MacBook Air for my dad and I was looking for a similar solution. The closest thing I found was on this thread - http://superuser.com/questions/253973/how-can-i-change-the-system-font-size-in-o s-x
When you run
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool trueI eventually solved it by keeping the native resolution and setting up font sizes individually for each application my dad uses. It's especially frustrating when Windows had the DPI scaling feature since XP as long as I remember.
You might be able to 'hack' your computer and enable 1400x900 HiDPI resolution through the software but...
1.) Your display is mostly likely only capable of displaying 1400x900, you need a display that can display 2x that resolution of 2800x1800 at a minimum. Only the 15inch Retina or some external monitor would be capable of that.
2.)If you enabled HiDPI it might not look good on your native 1400x900 display. The current 15 cMBP and rMBP can have the same hardware with few differences. They can have the same processor and gpu so, the only bottleneck to you doing retina resolution of 1400x900 HiDPI is the display itself. Maybe some internal software setting that enable the up and down scaling,which might be only active for retina MBP.
1.) Your display is mostly likely only capable of displaying 1400x900, you need a display that can display 2x that resolution of 2800x1800 at a minimum. Only the 15inch Retina or some external monitor would be capable of that.
I don't want to increase the resolution, that would make the font/icons smaller.
2.)If you enabled HiDPI it might not look good on your native 1400x900 display.
HiDPI may be what I'm looking for. Doing a search, looks like I can try Quartz Debug or some third party software like ResolutionTab to enable it for non-retina MBP. Thanks for your reply.
Try a demo of SwitchResX - I'm not sure that it will do exactly what you're looking to do, but it might be of some assistance.
Clinton
First thing is the resolution on your display is 1400x900, you cannot use any resolution above that value. If you do it will look serious bad.
To achieve a 1400x900 HiDPI resolution you need to have a display with a resolution of at least 2800 x 1800.
Bacially you are limited by your maximum display resolution which is a hardware attribute that you cannot change.
pcpu, you don't understand at all what he wants. clinton, that program won't do what he wants.
What the OP is talking about is that on a retina display there is the option to choose a lower resolution than 1440x900 and have it scale it up to still look reasonable, but have less screen space. Therefore larger icons and such. You can't do this on non retina displays. The closest thing is to set your resolution (found in the display panel of the preferences app) to a lower resolution that still matches your screen size, and it will scale it up somewhat, but it will not be as crisp as it is now unfortunately. You're using 1440x900 at the moment, which means you're on a 16:10 (or 8:5) display. So, you should be able to set it down to 1280x800 and that should have a similar effect to what the retina displays do.
@pizza29965: Yes, you understand what I'm asking for. But I do not want to change the actual resolution to 1280x800, I want to keep the native resolution.
Has anyone tried ResolutionTab with a non-retina MBP? Supposedly it can do 720x450 HiDPI mode with non-retina MBP, but that's too low resolution.
Ideally I want 1280x800 HiDPI mode for non-retina MBP running at native 1440x900 resolution.
@pizza29965
Read what I wrote, it is pretty clear. To achieve a 1400x900 HiDPI resolution you need to have a display with a resolution of at least 2800 x 1800.
The best he can do with his current 1400x900 display is 700x450 HiDPI. In order to replicate retina you need to divde your max_height, max_width of the display you want by 2.
There is no chance he will achieve 1280x800 HiDPI mode on a 1440x900 display; but he can on 2560x1600 display. How did I get 2560x1600, I multiplied 1280x800 by 2. It simple math.
Let me know if anything I said is not clear.
Sorry, but I don't think it's possible. The Retina display does let you choose a couple options that are higher resolution than half, but as far as I can tell those appear blurry just like selecting that smaller resolution does for you, and all it really does is make the OS treat it like that's the resolution. At best you'd only get a few things taht would look any better than just straight up setting your resolution to 1280x800. I looked around a lot and wasn't able to find anything.
@pcpu Sorry, but that wasn't what he was asking. On the Retina MacBook you have 4 or 5 scale options, a few of them make it so you don't have the full resolution possible, but it's bigger than 1/2 the display resolution anyway, and I guess it might display UI elements that are vector in the actual full resolution, but most things look blurry from what I've heard. He was asking if it was possible to do that same thing on his display, which I looked into, and I was unable to find any way to make the computer do the same thing on a non-retina display. Telling him about how retina works isn't what he wanted, he wanted the UI bigger, and the UI is entirely vector or some such at this point so it would have looked just fine bigger if he could scale.
resolution scaling for MacBook Pro (non-retina)
