Font size on my shiny new MBP

Question

I just got my brand new MBP i7 17" replacing my late 2008 MBP 15". Migration of everything was a breeze (took about an hour for 150GB of data and such). I had to run through a couple of updates of software, and I was ready to go.
My laptop is connected to a 24" LED Cinema Display through the mini-display port. I do most of my work on the LED display, using the MBP to show email and to occasionally dump an image or something that I need to copy to work on my main display.
The problem is that everything is tiny on the MBP. It's kind of cool that I can see my 50 or so Mail folders, but they're just on the edge of readability. I've done some tinkering with the resolution (it's set to 1920X1200), the same as my LED display. But the LED is perfect, but my MBP is not. I tried some lower resolutions, but the image was fuzzy, harder to read.
My 15" MBP didn't have this problem. The screen resolutions seem to match perfectly on my 15" and on the LED.
There must be a simple fix. I'm not finding it, because I've never had this issue, since this is my first 17" MBP. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The current 17" 1920 x 1200 screen has the smallest pixels of any Mac product, now or ever. This means that any graphic element made up of a specified pattern of lighter and darker pixels will be smaller on that screen than on any other Apple screen. Non-adjustable user-interface elements like the menu bar and the text in it, modal dialog boxes and the text in them, standard Open and Save dialog boxes and the text in them, and toolbars and palettes in many applications, are displayed smaller on that screen than on any other Apple display.
For comparison purposes, here is a table showing the actual pixels-per-inch resolution of various current and recent Apple displays (thanks, Pythagoras!):
13.3" MBP: 1280 x 800 pixels @ 113.5 pixels per inch
15.4" MBP: 1440 x 900 pixels @ 110.3 pixels per inch
15.4" hi-res MBP: 1680 x 1050 @ 128.6 pixels per inch
17.0" MBP: 1920 x 1200 pixels @ 133.2 pixels per inch
24" Apple LED display: 1920 x 1200 @ 113.2 pixels per inch
27" iMac or Cinema display: 2560 x 1440 @ 108.8 pixels per inch
30" Apple monitor: 2560 x 1440 @ 97.9 pixels per inch
As you can see, the 15.4" MBP with the standard-resolution 1440 x 900 display is pretty close, as far as pixel size is concerned, to the 24" Apple Cinema LED Display, and the 13.3" MBP display is nearly identical to the 24" display. But they all have substantially larger pixels than your 17", so it's no surprise that you're finding things harder to see on your new screen. Many applications do give you options for increasing the sizes of most things that appear in them, but the only way to make the menu bar and other non-adjustable user interface items that are part of the operating system look larger is to decrease the screen resolution. As you've seen, when you do that, everything gets blurry.
A pixel is not divisible: it can only be one color or one shade of gray, not part one color and part another. So when you use a fixed grid of 1920 x 1200 physical pixels, which is what your screen is, to try to simulate a grid of, say, 1680 x 1050 or 1440 x 900 pixels by setting your resolution lower, the best that can be done with the available physical grid is to approximate the appearance of the larger pixels in those other grids. The inescapable outcome and, in fact, the literal meaning of "approximation" in this context, is blurring.
Ideally, you would have looked hard at the 17" MBP's display in an Apple Store and made an informed decision about whether it was going to work out well for you before buying one. It may or may not have been possible for you to do that, and you may or may not have taken the trouble. It is true that for some people (more of them with older eyes than with younger ones), the screen on that machine is just not usable, and selecting a lower resolution and living with the resultant blurring is an unacceptable remedy. If you find yourself among those people, you may have to try to return your MBP before 14 days have gone by.