To long time owners - reading on retina screen

[username:]

This goes out to anyone who has had a retina macbook pro for a while. My eyes often fatigue and the screen on my MBA 2013 becomes blurry and hard to read on. To summarise the reading experience on the MBA, I would say it is 'uncomfortable'.

How do you find reading on your rMBP?

 

[leman]

As far as I consider, retina screens are the best screen you can have for working with text, save maybe for e-Ink (which has very limited applications).

 

[David58117]

A retina screen is much easier to read on than an air. I have both, and definitely feel less fatigued when using the retina for long periods of time.

Eink is definitely much better though..

 

[dyt1983]

edit: to remove personally identifying information not relevant to thread.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Brilliant

This goes out to anyone who has had a retina macbook pro for a while. My eyes often fatigue and the screen on my MBA 2013 becomes blurry and hard to read on. To summarise the reading experience on the MBA, I would say it is 'uncomfortable'.

How do you find reading on your rMBP?

To be honest I consider Text to be the best thing about retina. If you use windows a lot though be prepared for some rough text here and there as some things just don't work very well with the retina and it shows up terribly.

All in all retina is great and well worth the investment.

 

[redheeler]

This goes out to anyone who has had a retina macbook pro for a while. My eyes often fatigue and the screen on my MBA 2013 becomes blurry and hard to read on. To summarise the reading experience on the MBA, I would say it is 'uncomfortable'.

How do you find reading on your rMBP?

Retina makes text a lot crisper and certainly helps with eye fatigue. I suggest you try it yourself and see how much of a difference it makes for you.

 

[MagicBoy]

They're good, very good. IPS technology has excellent viewing angles and the screen is pin sharp. If only they could banish reflections... They are much reduced over the early unibody machines due to better coatings, but not a patch on the AG screen option on my old 2011.

 

[austinpike]

I had to replace a 17" w/matte screen with a 15" retina, and I've got to say I don't love working or reading on the 15" for extended periods. I don't know if it is the glossy finish or what. I have no problem working for hours on my matte 27" desktop displays. If you do some searching on retina screen fatigue you'll find plenty to read about, but probably no way to know how it works for you until you try it.

 

[flur]

I'm not a long-term retina user, but I do find retina easier to read on at its default font settings than an MBA at its default font settings. But...

When I first got my MBA, I couldn't use it for more than an hour or two without getting a headache. I could see how much more blurry the text was compared to my Vaio, or even to my POS Dell. I took it back to the Apple store and asked if something was wrong with the screen. The Genius told me it was within tolerances, but he adjusted my font smoothing. In the settings there's a toggle for "on" and "off", but there are other settings in between that can be accessed in terminal (he used that). After, I had no trouble reading on my MBA.

So, if you're having trouble and are thinking you have to replace your whole machine with a new one, you *might* not need to do that.

http://osxdaily.com/2014/10/27/change-font-smoothing-text-os-x-yosemite/

FWIW, I also changed my font-smoothing on my retina machine. I was fine with the text at the default resolution for the machine, but I wanted more screen real estate, and the super-bold text was not-so-great at 1440x900 (13" MBP). So I switched font smoothing to level 2 and now everything is wonderful.

 

[iUserz]

Retina is great! The only problem is that sometimes images look blurry because they're not optimized for the display (for example the formatting icons at the top of this post!)

For reading it's great, but could still strain your eyes. Maybe look into an e-reader to give your eyes a break?

 

[username:]

Retina is great! The only problem is that sometimes images look blurry because they're not optimized for the display (for example the formatting icons at the top of this post!)

For reading it's great, but could still strain your eyes. Maybe look into an e-reader to give your eyes a break?

I have an e-reader but it is much more convenient and time savings for me to read PDFs on my Mac while I take notes.

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I was hoping to get the nMB to replace my 2014 MBA 13 because of the retina screen, until it was announced and the specs weren't so great and the screen resolution wasn't so high. But I use my rMBP 15 a lot more often, and every time I pull out the MBA, I kind of cringe from the screen. And after seeing the nMB screen operating at the same desktop resolution as the MBA, I know the retina screen on it is that much better.

So to summarize, retina screens are that much better to me that I am pretty much abandoning my MBA for a slower and less connectable machine, and the rMBP 13 and 15 are even better.

This is what I feel like when I go from using my iPhone to the MBA. I wondered if it was just the bigger screen or if it was because of the retina screen vs. non-retina.

I have used a rMBP in the shops and found the screen pretty great. I was more interested in people who have been using them for a while and if they still have problems reading on the screen or if they like to read on their rMBP, or if you even prefer it.