The 15" Retina Display is actually more than Retina?

Question

The 15" Retina Display is actually more than Retina?

I just bought a 15" rMBP and I just learnt that there is an app called RDM out there which can "release the full potential" of the Retina display. (Some of you should know this as the app was released in 2012) What Apple recommends as "Retina" in the System Preferences is just text size which looks like 1440 x 900 on a 15" display, which Apple discreetly does not mention. Of course this 1440 x 900 gives you words with very smooth edges because of the potential high resolution of the display. So What is recommended as "Retina" in the System Preferences is not actually 2880 x 1800? With RDM you can have a resolution up to 3840x 2400. Considering this is a 16:10 display, that is equivalent to the 4K or UHD displays of the latest PC notebooks. So the Apple Retina displays are actually equivalent to UHD rather than just 2880 x 1800?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Jul 18, 2014 7:36 AM

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Answer 1

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,329 points

Jul 18, 2014 7:44 AM in response to chrisfromhongkong

Are you suggesting that the retina MBP display can be increased with this 'RDM' application to 3840 x 2400 from the maximum 2880 x 1800?

If so, can you provide a link to the developers web site, I would appreciate it.

Ciao.

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Answer 2

Jul 18, 2014 7:56 AM in response to OGELTHORPE

http://www.zdnet.com/how-to-get-the-most-from-your-macbook-pro-retina-display-70 00007009/

As suggested in this article, there are actually two apps which can do this, namely Retina DisplayMenu and SwitchResX. Apparently the former is free and the latter is commercial.

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Answer 3

Jul 18, 2014 7:56 AM in response to chrisfromhongkong

Apple's reference to a "Retina" display means that, at standard viewing distance, the pixels are too small to be individually visible. The "Best for Retina Display" setting gives the smoothest image but the tradeoff is less screen real-estate to work with, as you've discovered.

If you actually had your monitor set to display at 2880x1800 (I have with Eye-Friendly in the App Store), you'd be hard pressed to read much of anything because text would be so small. 3840x2400 would just make it even smaller so the image pixels and the display of them would no longer be one-to-one and image quality, to the extent you could even see it, would suffer. What RDM and Eye-Friendly can't do is make the monitor larger, which is where increased resolution would really pay off.

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Answer 4

Jul 18, 2014 8:04 AM in response to FatMac-MacPro

Yes, at 3840 x 2400 everything is so tiny that I have difficulty locating the cursor...

But my point is that, for some reason, Apple is hiding the fact that the Retina display is actually 4K standard.

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Answer 5

Jul 18, 2014 8:14 AM in response to chrisfromhongkong

chrisfromhongkong wrote:

...But my point is that, for some reason, Apple is hiding the fact that the Retina display is actually 4K standard.

Could that be because, if they advertised it as a viewing advantage, people would complain that they can see anything while they can on a 60" TV screen? We already can't see much at its native resolution and perhaps that's why it isn't made directly available in Preferences.

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