Right now, the new MacBook Pro is running Lion, but buy yours now, and you'll find a free upgrade to Mountain Lion in your inbox. We already know quite a bit about Mountain Lion, which is, as of this writing, about a month away from launch. But what we didn't know was the high-resolution support needed for these Retina displays. As of now, that support is sadly far from pervasive.
The primary Apple apps -- Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. -- have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.
Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges. You do have some control over this scaling, with five separate grades to choose from, but none will make these classic apps look truly good. At least, not until their developers release the updates they're no doubt frantically working on at this very moment.
Take Google Chrome, for example. You might forgive the buttons and UI elements for being ugly, but even the text rendered on webpages is blurry and distorted. It's bad enough that you won't want to use Google's browser until it's updated, which will surely leave some cynics wondering if indeed this isn't a ploy to get folks to spend a little more quality time with Safari. Good thing Safari's about ready for its own update.