Setting Resolution on a Retina MBP

By Alex Nichol

Sat, June 16th, 2012

The new Macbook Pro, along with its retina display, includes a new, simplified display settings preference pane. This preference pane, while allowing the user to switch between various retina-friendly preset resolutions, does not allow for the selection of custom resolutions. In fact, the available resolutions do not even include the display's native resolution, 2880x1800.

Despite the simplified preference pane, however, it is still possible for an application to modify the resolution manually. In fact, I personally crafted a simple command-line application to do just this: the application allows the user to set many common resolutions, including the native, full resolution. A user can download this executable with this link; it can be executed by dragging the unzipped file into Terminal, typing a width, a space, and a height (both in pixels), and hitting enter.

I have posted the source code to GitHub. In the future, I plan to craft a more user-friendly version of this software; typically a CLI is scary to users, especially when they are required to compile it themselves through Xcode.