Yes indeed. This is a great tip. On PowerPoint it also seems to work in every view except the slideshow.
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Thinking of buying a retina 15 MBP - questions about the screen
- Thread starter cmm
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I love mine. I don't regret getting it. The performance is great and all other laptop displays look like crap after you use it. I just wish MSFT would hurry up with official Office updates. I also wish Chrome would fix the bug, and that Mozilla would hurry up with their retina optimization.
It is unwieldy and does feel delicate compared to the regular MBPs. And like a supermodel, it is gorgeous. Its like the Miranda Kerr of laptops.
"Long time" is a relative term when it comes to Office. I think Office '13 will definitely have it, if not earlier. So 1 year at most. Office for Mac for the last few iterations has been a year behind the Windows version. They could release a patch for '11 between now and the release of '13.
Here is what Word looks like on a MBPr set at the 1920x1200 scaled resi (I don't like the lack of real estate at the "best for retina" 1440x900, yet the native 2880x1800 is way too small to read). Click on it to zoom in all the way and really get a feel for how pixelated it looks. The Window behind it is Safari, and font clearly looks crisper. The UI elements in Word look the worst imo. Pretty ugly, but not unusable. Pages has been updated, if you want an alternative.
It is unwieldy and does feel delicate compared to the regular MBPs. And like a supermodel, it is gorgeous. Its like the Miranda Kerr of laptops.
"Long time" is a relative term when it comes to Office. I think Office '13 will definitely have it, if not earlier. So 1 year at most. Office for Mac for the last few iterations has been a year behind the Windows version. They could release a patch for '11 between now and the release of '13.
Here is what Word looks like on a MBPr set at the 1920x1200 scaled resi (I don't like the lack of real estate at the "best for retina" 1440x900, yet the native 2880x1800 is way too small to read). Click on it to zoom in all the way and really get a feel for how pixelated it looks. The Window behind it is Safari, and font clearly looks crisper. The UI elements in Word look the worst imo. Pretty ugly, but not unusable. Pages has been updated, if you want an alternative.
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Thank you so much! I appreciate this... but why do you say it'll look like it does on my 17 MBP? That resolution is 1920x1200...
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Why does it look pixalated now, when you have it at 1920x1200... it doesn't look that way on my 17 MBP when the resolution is native at 1920x1200......?
This is what I am failing to understand...
This is how Retina scaling works:
1. If an application is not Retina-enabled, it will think that you have a 1440x900 display, not a 2880x1800 Retina display. It will run at the same physical size (that you can measure with a ruler against the display) as on a 1440x900 display, but it will not look crisp and sharp. It will look just like how it would look on a 1440x900 display. Every pixel that the application thinks it has will be displayed with four pixels on the Retina display.
2. If, however, an application has been updated to support the Retina display, it will run exactly like the non-updated application, except that every pixel that the application thinks it had will actually correspond to one pixel on the Retina display, thus making it very sharp and clear.
When I say that a non-Retina application will run on the Retina display at the same size as one on your 17" MBP's display, I mean that the application won't appear absurdly tiny because it thinks the display has 2880x1800 pixels. Every application will act as if the Retina display were 1440x900 pixelseven the Retina-enabled apps. The difference is that the Retina-enabled apps have higher-resolution images for the Retina display to show.
Thank you for explaining!
But why can't it display the 1440x900 resolution without displaying 4 pixels for every 1 pixel? Is apple trying to fix that for the future?
For the app to have a 1:1 correspondence with what it thinks it is displaying and what the actual output on the screen is (measured in pixel count), the application would have to be four times as small as it should be (two times smaller in both dimensions).
This should help: Imagine you have a picture taken from the internet, and it's a small picture (low resolution). If you display it so that it takes up your whole display, you'll easily see how pixellated it is. However, if you shrink the image down enough by rescaling it, you can get it so that it doesn't appear pixellated at all. It's the same exact deal with non-retina applications. Retina applications are just high-res pictures (up to analogy).
Unfortunately, there is no way of making only the non-retina applications extremely tiny so that they're not pixellated. If you want to shrink EVERYTHING that the display shows (even the Retina apps, and the Dock, and all of the text), you can set the screen to 2880x1900, but this is obviously very inconvenient. Often, if the low-resolution image is all that we have, we chose to view it large anyway, regardless of the impact on its apparent quality. This is because we don't want to use a tiny picture. I don't think you want to use tiny applications.
Edit: I see you live in Cambridge. I know the Cambridgeside Galleria has iPhone 4s/4Ss, iPad 3s, and Retina MBPs. Whenever you have time, you should compare the Retina MBPs with the 15" regular MBPs.
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