This is not supporting the retina display, and I have to stand by the fact that their marketing team is wrong about the support and wrong to release a PR saying it's here - this is just supporting a screen at 2880 resolution and they didn't need an update to do that, it would have worked straight away (apart from the bug which prevented the native resolution of 2880 to show up which it already should have - but it's useless). In fact when you change to this resolution and turn off HiDPI (unsupported by Apple, but passively recommended by Parallels) you lose the only assets they updated to be compatible at retina (read: HiDPI) resolutions. Even in the screenshots Parallels provide, they run at this resolution and you don't see the only thing they updated to support Retina - the icons and the text outside of the VM!
Furthermore, changing your resolution to 2880 is not possible using vanilla Mac OS X. You have to install a utility not provided by Apple or Parallels to do that. But again, changing to 2880 turns off HiDPI mode - and support for retina infers support for HiDPI, which they do not provide. This is about supporting retina in windowed mode as well as full-screen. Neither are in Parallels Desktop at the moment. Not to mention Mac OS X is useless at the hacked 2880 native resolution, so you might as well run bootcamp - the thing that Parallels is marketed to prevent.
Supporting retina resolution means drawing to a different graphics buffer so that Mac OS X does not scale up the graphics with horrible artifacts and pixel removal - Parallels does not do this, save for their new icon.
Here are Apple's guidelines for supporting high resolution displays - these techniques have not yet been implemented for the virtual machine window: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsAnimation/Conceptual/HighResolutionOSX/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40012302-CH1-SW1
If I had to analyse Parallels actions - they're not stupid (they must have some amazing engineering talen), they must be aware that they have not implemented support for HiDPI / Retina but still marketed it as if they have. Of course, making the changes in their drawing subsystem may be quite a re-architecture task - something that is more suited for Parallels Desktop 8. However, in the meantime, they may have wanted to capitalise on new Retina Macbook purchases (it's the only Mac that truly has a feature no windows laptops have, so they may have assumed lots of converts (new Mac OS users who could use a windows virtualising solution) would start with the Retina Macbook. So they update the logo and other icons to be 2x, make sure all the text is written using normal Cocoa APIs, don't update the actual virtualising code at all and rush out a press release stating the new update supports Retina... angering all the new Retina Macbook owners who purchase Parallels Desktop because of their announcement.
It's not that they haven't implemented it yet - that's understandable. It's that they've told everyone they have - and sold a product to us under false pretences. Inexcusable for a company like this.
Last edited: Aug 12, 2012