If you need more screen real estate, you can change to a different scaled resolution in the System Preferences. If you need it, you can go with an effective 1440x900 or even 1680x1050 resolution. It's not an integer mapping between virtual pixels to real pixels like it is with 1280x800, but it looks almost as good - and better than a native 1440x900 or 1680x1050 display.

Font rendering looks quite crappy in anything but exact 2x resolution doubling mode. I haven't looked into it, but suspect that subpixel rendering is disabled.

This isn't true, speaking as a happy retina MBP (15") owner. It's almost remarkable just how perfect everything, including fonts, look at the scaled resolutions. It certainly surprised me; the sheer tininess of the pixels really messes with your intuition with this. When you can no longer distinguish between pixels, things like scaling work far better than you have any right to expect.

The only time I have ever seen any issue with scaling was whilst moving a 1 pixel horizontal line across the screen on the "highest resolution" setting, and that's only because I was looking for it.

I have played around with a 15" rMBP in a store and colleague's 13" rMBP at work. Both exhibited the same symptoms in scaling modes other than 2x: font outlines were a lot more blurry than in the 2x mode.

I've owned the 15" rMBP since June. I use it exclusively in scaled 1920X1200 mode. Fonts are pristinely rendered to my eye. I'm very skeptical that you're able to detect blur in the font outlines at any reasonable distance in properly optimized applications.

What program were you using when you noticed the blur?

I must've gotten one of the few MBP Retinas that looks great at the non-2X resolutions. The non-2X resolutions might not be as sharp as the 2X resolution, but its still very sharp, and leagues sharper than non-Retina displays.

In my experience they are slightly blurrier at the non-doubled resolutions, but still much, much better looking than on a non-retina MBP.

Were you looking at native cocoa text controls or at e.g. Chrome?

Text rendered by Safari in a web page.

Actually, for HiDPI applications, font rendering is perfect at every resolution. Only bitmaps get scaled.

Not true at all, in my experience - I've had my retina 15" MBP for a while and haven't had any problems. I run at 1680. The only noticeable problems are blurry raster graphics - which happen at any scaling except 1x (2880.)

The way the high resolutions work is that the screen is rendered at 2x then scaled down to fit the display. This does lose a bit of that subpixel antialiasing, so you're right that it doesn't appear quite as crisp as the native retina scaling. Hopefully this is something they're working on - Quartz could theoretically be modified to detect the scaling factor for the display and render text, shapes, etc to match the native pixels.

When you scale down a subpixel-rendered text that way, you pretty much destroy the subpixel rendering effect.

What I think happens: in modes other than 2x, text is rendered without subpixel rendering. It is scaled down, and possibly a slight sharpening effect is applied in the process. Anyway, the result is not as good as the awesome font rendering we are used to in OS X.

Text on rMBP at "1920x1200": http://i.imgur.com/FAemY.png

I figure that what it does it use the actual rendered pixel grid for subpixel calculations.

Is that in a "Retina app"? If so, my understanding is that text for them is rendered by the system at the right size (so not rendered then rescaled) at any resolution.

Maybe ever so slightly (I would disagree with "quite crappy") - but in any case, worth it for supremely adjustable screen real estate.

Do you have screenshots of this, or a link to screenshots?

This is what it looks like at the 1680x1050 scale factor:

http://cl.ly/KhRt

Note that screenshots are not going to be representative of what you'd see in reality if you're viewing these screenshots on a "non-retina" display. So whilst technically interesting, in that these screenshots can show us how font rendering works when scaled, it's not representative of what you'd actually see if you had a retina display.

This is definitely true. Also, it's worth noting that I had to fake the screenshot - screenshots taken in "more space" mode are taken at the res they're rendered at. I took a screenshot of my screen at that res, switched back to "best for retina", put the screenshot full-screen and took another screenshot of that. It looks pretty much the same to me, but there could be subtleties about the live downscaling that the OS is doing that are different when it's a screenshot vs the actual screen.

Yeah, this seems non-representative, especially if text is rendered natively (as other comments claim). Probably pretty accurate for images though.

Thanks. This is very representative of the font rendering quality I am talking about. (I.e. this is what it looks like in real life too, with your eyes.)

Instead of the normally very crisp rendering, you get this bloated/fuzzy look.

Is there a performance and power consumption impact to changing to a different scaled resolution or is it negligible?

The Displays section of System Preferences says that "using a scaled resolution may affect performance", but if it does it doesn't seem to be noticeable, at least for the kind of stuff that I do.

Cool, thx. Marco Arment says there are scrolling issues: "I’ve also found that when the 15” is running one of these scaled modes, it has noticeably worse scrolling performance."

http://www.marco.org/2012/11/06/the-retina-macbook-pro-13

I use the retina MBP at "1920x1200", which wasn't available on any 15" MacBook previously. I do wish this was the "native" resolution though. "1440x900" is comically large.

This new crop of machines is pretty tempting but I think it makes sense to wait until Haswell lands in the next generation. By that time a lot more applications will be updated to deal with the retina displays too.

Like a lot of Apple products that push some new hardware concept this first generation seems to have some rough edges.

Absolutely this. I see very little point in paying a hefty premium for such a great screen to then be limited to such a tiny area of real-estate; or to have to sacrifice (much of) the beauty of the screen if you set it up for a reasonable real estate. Even before considering the struggles of the iGPU on such a high end machine.

The 15" is much more usable (with 1440x900 X2), but i really can't see that the simple 'pixel doubling' of the rMBPs is really a proper solution for a laptop-- IMO a retina PPI with display elements equivalent to a normal screen somewhere in the 16xx-19xx (px wide) range would be ideal-- and i cant see apple (or anyone else) putting a 4K screen in a laptop in the foreseeable future.

Is anyone aware of any movement towards resolution independence in linux (or anywhere?)

I'm a bit of a "fussy arse" and I have the 15" Retina and have no such problems. Indeed, I'm surprised just how often I change resolution. High for media work, low for browsing the web.. it's a breath of fresh air.

There are some very minor aberrations (banding on certain hues, mostly) at 1920x1080 but you have to really be looking for them. And the text still looks razor sharp. So it's even better than I was expecting before I bought it.

I don't understand why Apple went this way. They seem to prioritize chrome quality over content, in the non-2x modes.

This is really strange since text with subpixel rendering in the content area is a clear benefit, while I have yet to see an app that provides subpixel rendering of its chrome elements.

I did the napkin math because I was curious...the downgrade in resolution is equivalent to cutting the 13.3 inch screen down by 1.5 inch to 11.8 inches. (a 27% decrease in screen real estate)

Here's what I did, did I fcuk up?

Per Pythagoras, the diagonal of 1440x900 is 1698; the diagonal of 1280x800 is 1509.

1509 / 1698 = .89

.89 * 13.3 inches = 11.8 inches

Alternatively, sqrt(1-21%) = .89 And yeah typo. 21% reduction in pixels

Ahh okay. I was wondering where the 27 came from. Wasn't thinking about the sqrt. Fair enough.

21% in number of pixels. You have to take the sqrt of that before scaling the diagonal

I was under the impression that the 15" Retina MBP had a native resolution of 1440 by 900.

It has a "UI resolution" of 1440x900, yes. But the way the chrome in OS X is designed, 1440x900 is suitable for a 13" screen, not a 15" screen.

The previous high res option of MBP 15" had a resolution of 1680x1050. This (doubled) would have been a good resolution for the new 15" MBP retina display.

I have been using 1440 by 900 for years on my 2007 MacBook Pro, and I have no complaints regarding it. I have seen the high res version of the 15" and it felt too small to be comfortable to read.

Congratulations, the retina MBPs are designed for you :).

Very much agree.