MacBook Pro 15in High-res hard to read. What setting should I change?

Question

I just bought a new MacBook Pro with the high-res screen (1680x1050), but I noticed that all text is so small that to read it my face has to be like 18 inches away. When I adjusted the resolution to be the next sizes down (1440 x 852, and 1440 x 852 stretched), as well as all the other smaller sizes it made everything look blurry (similarly to when you use Command + Scroll to zoom in, how the text is really soft on the edges, and difficult to read). Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing, or another resolution settings area that I can use. I feel like this 2800 dollar notebook may be only good for movie watching otherwise. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is a problem inherent to LCDs. Each pixel displayed corresponds to a physical pixel on the display. If you set the screen to any resolution other than its default, then it has to "guess" about what to do, because you might have 1 pixel trying to display over 1.5 physical pixels. This is why it looks blurry - you no longer have a 1:1 ratio of the pixels being displayed to the physical pixels.

If you want everything to be bigger, you have two options. One is to see if it's not too late to exchange your new laptop for the same model but with the lower-resolution option; I believe 1440x900 is the default resolution for the 15" MBP.

Your other option is to adjust the DPI of your operating system. DPI (dots per inch) is the measure of how large objects appear on the screen. Increasing the DPI will cause UI elements, text, etc. to appear bigger, though photos, etc. will remain the same size. This is still somewhat buggy in OS X, but there is another question on Super User covering how to do this; see change DPI on OS X.

Answer 2

You can usually enable zooming of some sort in all content-displaying applications.

• Safari (Preferences » Advanced),
• Apple Mail (Preferences » Fonts and Colors),
• TextEdit (Preferences),
• other text editors (in their respective preferences),
• Preview (use regular zoom functionality, Cmd-Plus, Cmd-R),
• Pages (Cmd->),
• Keynote (Cmd->)
• etc.

You will still have to live with the default font sizes in other user interface elements, but there's usually not a lot to read anyway.

Mac OS X's interface scaling functionality isn't really advanced enough for serious use, unfortunately.