The primary benefits of a Retina screen go without saying, but I’ll say them anyway: incredible pixel density and beautiful colors create a sharp and vibrant image. The specific reason for the sharpness of everything is that where there used to be one pixel, there is now a group of pixels refining the image and creating the sharpness you see. This creates a much more visually appealing image but, when it comes to the potential screen real estate of the computer, is very wasteful. All those pixels could be put to work showing you more things on your screen, not just sharpening what is already there.
The easiest way to achieve this is to go into the display setting in System Preferences. By default the setting “Best for Retina display” should be checked. If you check the other option, “Scaled”, then it brings up a list of different resolutions. “More Space” is the most space you can select in the Displays preferences. To give you some reference, a 15” Retina MacBook Pro’s default resolution has the same amount of screen real estate as the old 15” computers, 1440 × 900, not very much room to work with. The “More Space” setting brings this up to the equivalent of a 1920 × 1200, a much better amount of screen real estate.
But what if you want to squeeze all the usable screen real estate out of these amazing displays? That’s where a third party app called EasyRes comes in. Costing only $7.99, this little app lives in your top bar and easily lets you switch between all possible resolutions the display can conform to. This includes an option for “native” resolution mode. This mode utilizes all the pixels of the display with no doubling, which massively increased the highest usable resolution of the display from 1920 × 1200 to its truly massive natural resolution of 2880 × 1800. Now this does make all of your text incredibly small but if you are using it on your lap and need to improve your workflow, more screen real estate can be incredibly valuable.