Setting the Native Resolution on a Retina MBP

Hey guys, this is Matt. Heads 101, and today I'm gonna be showing you how to set the native resolution on a Retina Display MacBook Pro.

Now, as you probably already know, the Retina Display MacBook Pro comes with a 280 by 1800 display. Because the pixel density is so high, Apple decided to double up the pixels, so everything looks really clear. It's, you know, like four times as large as it actually should be.

Now this is great, but there are some people—me included—who would be interested to see what this computer actually looks like with a one-to-one pixel ratio. What I mean by that is every pixel is actually one pixel, so everything looks really teeny. It's as if you have a gigantic monitor, you know, to work with because there are so many pixels.

Unfortunately, if I just have a look in System Preferences, Apple has no way to do this. You can go down to scale; then there are a bunch of different presets, but none of those presets are actually the full resolution. They're just scaled versions of the Retina display resolution, basically.

Now, I'm not exactly sure why Apple didn't include a feature to set the native resolution. Maybe it's because everything looks too small, whatever. But for whatever reason, they chose not to. But it's still possible for an app to set this resolution, so I went ahead and made an app that does this called Free Res, and you can download it with a link in the description of this video.

But anyway, let me open it up, and you see here it has a list of all the resolutions that you can possibly set on your computer. Now note that Free Res doesn't actually work for setting a Retina display resolution, so you can't really set any of these options. You can only set regular unscaled options.

But that doesn't matter, because all we want to do is set the full resolution on this display. All I have to do is click on this preset and then hit Set Resolution, and it'll set the highest resolution on my computer. So let me do that now.

Alright, so as you may be able to tell, I am on my full native resolution. This is higher than 1080p, and it's on a 15-inch display, so it's rather ridiculous. Now, as I mentioned before, in order to switch back to the old resolution, I have to go into System Preferences and hit one of these presets.

Now I'm gonna hit the best for Retina because that's what I normally back on normal Retina display. But anyway, that was a brief video on how to use a simple Mac application that I made to set the native resolution on a Retina Display MacBook Pro, you know, so you can see what it's like, mess around with it.

I don't really suggest using it because everything's really small, but if you're in need of a gigantic monitor or a high-resolution monitor or something like that, this is exactly right for you. So anyway, thanks for watching, subscribe, and goodbye!