Installation & update
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MacBook Pro 17" HI-RES

Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi all,

I'm going to buy a MacBook Pro 17" and I'm stuck on the following dilemma: should I buy the hi-resolution version or not?
I'm just afraid that interface elements (menus, windows, palettes) would be too small on it.

Is there anyone who can share their experience with hi-res MacBook Pros?
6 REPLIES 6
Dwight
Newcomer
What is your age and your eyeglasses?
Dwight Atkinson
Erich
Contributor
I would get it (in fact I did) and not worry too much about menus being too small. There are a number of ways to deal with this should it prove problematic.

First, if your menus are too small you can always bump your screen size down.

Second, if you just need to temporarily zoom in to see an item hit control and scroll with the track pad or mouse. Provided you have the zoom turned on in the Universal Access control panel, this will enlarge what ever area of the screen your pointer is currently located in.

HTH
Erich

AC 19 6006 & AC 20
Mac OS 10.11.5
15" Retina MacBook Pro 2.6
27" iMac Retina 5K
owen
Newcomer
Get it .. its fine and you can always reduce the res if you have problems

it also has the advantage of being able attach 1920x1200 monitors like the 23" Apple or Dell 20"-27" without having to rearrange all your palletes every time as you do with the 1680x1050
cheers,

Owen Sharp

Design Technology Manager
fjmt | francis-jones morehen thorp

iMac 27" i7 2.93Ghz | 32GB RAM | OS 10.10 | Since AC5
Anonymous
Not applicable
MacOS will be resolution-independent soon, so menus will probably get bigger in the future. However I'm quite worried about ArchiCAD palettes. They have very small font sizes. Are you able to enter, say, a line length without zooming on the palette? I'm afraid that with a hi-res screen those numbers would get unreadable!
owen wrote:
Get it .. its fine and you can always reduce the res if you have problems

it also has the advantage of being able attach 1920x1200 monitors like the 23" Apple or Dell 20"-27" without having to rearrange all your palletes every time as you do with the 1680x1050
I set up Palette Schemes in the Work Environment for the different monitor configurations I have so I never have to rearrange when going with a solo monitor or dual monitors.
Rex Maximilian, Honolulu, USA - www.rexmaximilian.com
ArchiCAD 27 (user since 3.4, 1991)
16" MacBook Pro; M1 Max (2021), 32GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, 32-Core GPU
Apple Vision Pro w/ BIMx
Creator of the Maximilian ArchiCAD Template System
Anonymous
Not applicable
Sound wrote:
MacOS will be resolution-independent soon
Hi Sound,

If your using OS X 3.9 and QT 6.5.2+ with a Quartz Extreme supported graphics card it already is. Everything you see is OpenGL. The one snafu is for those who select anything to render as "Full Quality" as that is what you get. Full Quality is the highest quality the computer can display. You want to avoid this as you will be struggling with image quality issues especially if you are using a laptop or only have a small display connected during the render.

Unlike the days of old when you just selected a larger display in preferences while rendering the OS uses multiple virtual displays and you are limited only by the size of the OpenGL texture supported by the GC which for many "normal" cards this is 2048 in any direction.

If your goal is a higher resolution than the connected display supports never select "Full Quality" anything. Full quality is up to 1920x1080 depending on the connected display. i.e selecting Full Quality 1920 x 1080 on a 15" MBP will get you an image of 1440 x 878 (900-menu).

As a MBP 2,2 (ATY, RadeonX1600 256MB VRAM) user I am limited to 2048 x 2048 for rendering to a file but could never display the entire content on my machine as it exceeds "full" quality. My GC can actually support 2056 x 1600 physical display but the OpenGL texture is limited to 2048 in any direction.

You should be able to change the default size of the menus and tool bars via the command line or a property list editor (easier). I have not tried this with AC but have done so to get rid of the menus and pallets in some other apps.

defaults read com.graphisoft.ArchiCAD will show some of the defaults but menus and tool pallets may have their own property lists. Maybe someone here knows where.

Jeffrey