Installed Mountain Lion last night. No discernible difference.

Weird, I had heard there was supposed to be a way to get it to run without resizing anything without downloading third party tools, but I guess not. If you're wondering, the program I used was SetResX and it seems to work as expected, but it overrides anything you do with System Preferences and vice versa.

I find it funny when Apple fans tell me that Apple are the one company that don't care about mere "specs" or "features" because instead they care about things like "experience", when right now they seem the company most obsessed by it - every single advert is pushing this one spec, without telling me anything about what benefit it actually means. If it was so important, I wonder why people didn't criticise the rubbish low resolutions Apple phones had for years...

In any event, despite using this Mac only for a couple of hours, my old laptop's display, which was a very nice 1920x1200 panel with a built in color calibrator, now looks like a dim mass of giant pixels.

What does your new laptop look like when run at 1920x1080 (or similarly "lower" resolution)?

I find it funny when Apple fans tell me that Apple are the one company that don't care about mere "specs" or "features" because instead they care about things like "experience", when right now they seem the company most obsessed by it - every single advert is pushing this one spec, without telling me anything about what benefit it actually means. If it was so important, I wonder why people didn't criticise the rubbish low resolutions Apple phones had for years...

[quote name='cowsarenotevil' timestamp='1343688621' post='4964639']
In any event, despite using this Mac only for a couple of hours, my old laptop's display, which was a very nice 1920x1200 panel with a built in color calibrator, now looks like a dim mass of giant pixels.

What does your new laptop look like when run at 1920x1080 (or similarly "lower" resolution)?
[/quote]

If you've followed the thread, resolution is a lot more difficult to talk about on the retina MBP. Though my MBP hasn't looked bad at any "resolution" I have used. I just find the "best" mode to be a bit too cramped on the UI side.

Got a great laptop already and should it die within the next few years I would opt for a sager or a Alienware(currently using one). Don't like mac and never will(way too white for me).

[quote name='cowsarenotevil' timestamp='1343688621' post='4964639']
In any event, despite using this Mac only for a couple of hours, my old laptop's display, which was a very nice 1920x1200 panel with a built in color calibrator, now looks like a dim mass of giant pixels.

What does your new laptop look like when run at 1920x1080 (or similarly "lower" resolution)?
[/quote]

Running at one of the out-of-box settings it looks like a less dim mass of inconsistently-sized pixels. Running at actual 1920x1200 it looks like a less-dim mass of giant and also slightly-fuzzy pixels. Neither option is particularly satisfying*, but then, I wouldn't really want to run it at these settings, and you knew this already so I don't know why you're asking.

*with more consistent software support the first option would be

Don't like mac and never will(way too white for me).

So the silver and black laptop we've been discussing is too white for you?

[quote name='Dwarf King' timestamp='1343759121' post='4964939']
Don't like mac and never will(way too white for me).

So the silver and black laptop we've been discussing is too white for you?
[/quote]

Yep the black keyboard buttons on a silver/white background is too white for me. My machine has a black keyboard. In fact everything is black. I do not like the keyboards lights on the macs(not many choices). I do not like the design. I do not like the mac OS design. In fact mac has never really been able to awake my passion. It is just a machine with round curves and mostly white colors here and there. Also I have noticed that most laptops, even the expensive ones, are cheaper than mac if you buy them with exactly the same hardware.

I mean I understand that some people might find these new Mac things interesting as that is the way design goes(some like it and others don't). I like the design of Sager, Alienware laptops, Rock laptops and Nova notebooks but not Mac. I do like a big Mac though

Your picture also "only" shows a black rim around the screen so it is not really "black".

You might not know the saying:

"Blac is the colour that is good,
so say I and many mo;
blac is my hat, blac is my hood
blac is all that longeth therto."

Old English song and therefore in old English

Forgive me my utter ignorance, but after thinking about this for several days, I still cannot figure out how the entire Retina thing is supposed to work. Maybe I'm just too stupid.

So you have an ultra-high resolution on a small-ish display. This means that UI elements using the same pixel size are tiny. So far, obvious.

Consequently, you scale the user interface, such as window borders and buttons, up by a factor of 4. Now they have a "normal" size again, and less visible aliasing. So far, so good, all understood. And, sounds like a brilliant idea.

However, some programs might assumes that screen pixels have a certain size, which is problematic. Here I'm starting to get puzzled. Displays have had different resolutions for decades, and fonts have been measured in "points" rather than pixels for decades as well (with the exception of Internet Exploder). Points are independent of how many pixels are beneath them. So the design choice is to render the window border and other GUI elements as well as "some special" programs at full resolution, and leave everything else at lower resolution.

Now, a quick Google on Retina tells me that there is for example a program called "Firefox", and another one called "Chrome" which both need to be rewritten to be "native" (excuse me? do they run under an emulator or something?), so they render at the same quality as their competiting program "Safari".
What exactly is the hindrance to rendering, say, 12pt text at, well, 12pt size with full resolution without requiring special tricks? What is the hindrance to scale a bitmap that has so-and-so-many pixels which is supposed to be shown at a size of 4x3cm by using a plain normal stretch blit? Even if a program foolishly attempts to draw a fixed-size 72x72 pixel image, what is the hindrance to secretly stretch-blitting this to 288*288 and still rendering the 12pt text in the same window at full resolution?

I can see how it might be difficult for a program like e.g. Photoshop to get along, as what it shows in its windows is just "pixels". However, if you only tell Photoshop that the window has 4x as many pixels in every direction, it will give you 4x as many pixels in every direction, too. The only thing you have to make sure is to also tell the program the correct scale, so the rulers (which are in millimeters or inches) are drawn correctly. So again, what's the hindrance to doing so? I mean, seriously, it cannot be so hard to get this right?

Now, a quick Google on Retina tells me that there is for example a program called "Firefox", and another one called "Chrome" which both need to be rewritten to be "native" (excuse me? do they run under an emulator or something?), so they render at the same quality as their competiting program "Safari".

[sup][citation needed][/sup]?

Now, a quick Google on Retina tells me that there is for example a program called "Firefox", and another one called "Chrome" which both need to be rewritten to be "native" (excuse me? do they run under an emulator or something?), so they render at the same quality as their competiting program "Safari".
What exactly is the hindrance to rendering, say, 12pt text at, well, 12pt size with full resolution without requiring special tricks? What is the hindrance to scale a bitmap that has so-and-so-many pixels which is supposed to be shown at a size of 4x3cm by using a plain normal stretch blit? Even if a program foolishly attempts to draw a fixed-size 72x72 pixel image, what is the hindrance to secretly stretch-blitting this to 288*288 and still rendering the 12pt text in the same window at full resolution?

I can see how it might be difficult for a program like e.g. Photoshop to get along, as what it shows in its windows is just "pixels". However, if you only tell Photoshop that the window has 4x as many pixels in every direction, it will give you 4x as many pixels in every direction, too. The only thing you have to make sure is to also tell the program the correct scale, so the rulers (which are in millimeters or inches) are drawn correctly. So again, what's the hindrance to doing so? I mean, seriously, it cannot be so hard to get this right?

The problem for browsers is that they usually don't use the OS features to render the actual web content since doing so would greatly harm their ability to support CSS, to get retina text in an OS X application you have to either use the cocoa API(most normal apps do this) or rewrite your rendering to take advantage of the higher monitor resolution. (IIRC Apple had to update Safari to support Retina aswell).

Overall it shouldn't be that hard to update your software to take advantage of the retina display so i'm sure chrome and firefox will support it shortly. (For a browser the easiest way would probably be to switch to rendering at the full resolution and then scale images manually).

Edit: Google had a Chrome beta with Retina support a few weeks ago so it should be available properly soon (if it isn't allready)