MacBook – Size of text in the new Retina MacBook Pros

Applications using standard Cocoa APIs should get retina text for free.

This was the same way it was released with the iPhone 4 in iOS. If you used standard UIKit, you basically got it all for free, and just had to update resources, etc.

So, with a Retina MBP as of right now, many apps need to add @2X resources (for things like images, etc), but otherwise standard applications should render all other content as retina.

Yes you can, but you probably will not choose to do so. When you really want to force the display into 2880x1800 you can easily configure it that way. Here are four of the better options available today to do what you ask:

• SwitchResX
• Retina DisplayMenu (used to be SetResX)
• scrutil
• ChangeResolution

That said, items like the menu bar with the Apple icon are extremely small at 2880x1800 and you don't need the entire screen to at that high resolution for a properly build application to let the windows it controls have the full resolution. The scaling modes are pretty good, and you can always reduce your font sizes even while running at the doubled 1440x900 resolution. Most people will never need to set 2880x1800 since they really only care that the applications they use get the retina treatment and don't need to force the rest of the UI to run with such a dense packing of pixels.