It may be nice to look at as everything is super crisp, but why are windows and the taskbar so freaking huge??? Why is when I put it to 1680x1050 or 1900x1200 the text doesn't look as sharp? Anyway to get more screen real estate but not sacrifice the sharpness of the text?
Exactly. 1400 x 900 in HiDPI mode makes everything so crisp and sharp. When you increase the resolution you lose in DPI, thus making the display not as sharp as in the standard Retina setting, but still very good.
Yea but they could have made it the equivalent of at least 1680x1050, which still would have looked great and given us more space.
That would mean that they would have to use a 3360x2100 resolution and i doubt there was any screen with that resolution available back then, and your rMBP version where really pushing in GPU vise.
Because the technologies for that isn't there yet. You do understand that it's a 15" 2800x1800 panel, right? Sometime that wasn't even mass-produced before Apple came into the picture. To make it equivalent of 1680x1050, they have to find a company to produces millions of 15" 3360x2100 panels. Right now, the latest technologies are in IGZO panels from Sharp. The highest resolution they have with IGZO is: 15.6 inch, 3200 x 1800 pixel screen. If Apple decides to adopt IGZO panels, it'll have an equivalent resolution of 1600x900, which really isn't that much but the power savings might be.
The retina MBP does have the options for 1680x1050 equivalent and 1920x1200 equivalent in the display preferences, it's just the default setting that is 1400x900 equiv. With a free app from the app store you can even run at 2800x1800 mode and have more real estate than a 30" ACD. And for those wondering about if it has the GPU power for 3360x2100 or 3840x2400 for the GUI-it does, because that is the resolution the 1650 and 1920 equivalent modes run at then it down-scales on the fly to 2800x1800.
He's talking about native Retina resolution, that is only 1400x900. He already knows about the other resolutions, he's asking why the text isn't clear in those resolutions.
The best for Retina scaling runs pixel doubled (quadruple the number of pixels), the other scales can't run at the same dpi so they're not as sharp. The Retina display itself always runs at 2800x1800 regardless of the scaling.