iPhone 6 Screen Resolution Broken Down In Detail

Long-time Apple reporter John Gruber has taken on the issue of the iPhone 6 this weekend with a detailed analysis on the potential screen resolutions of Apple’s upcoming smartphones. Basing his thoughts on the existing data, with a little bit of theory and examination of Apple’s historical trends on pixels and points, Gruber has put his cards on the table.

He makes a few sensible assumptions, namely that the main one being that the physical size of the screens will be 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches over the two devices, and the new devices will come with screens in a 16:9 ratio to aid media consumption. He is also clear in stating that this is not ‘insider information’ but a very well thought game of ‘what could it be?’

But after giving it much thought, and a lot of tinkering in a spreadsheet, here is what I think Apple is going to do:

4.7-inch display: 1334 × 750, 326 PPI @2x retina level

5.5-inch display: 2208 × 1242, 461 PPI @3x retina level

Underpinning the calculation are two key data points. The first is the physical size of the screen, which has been taken as gospel; and the second is the pixels per inch values that Apple has historically favoured across all their hardware, even those with different screen technologies. Given those fixed values, and considering the value of 16:9 as a screen ratio, the sensible choice is above, although it’s worth nothing that this goes against the current thinking that the 4.7 inch iPhone display will run at 1704 x 960 pixels.

One key think to remember in Gruber’s calculation, and all the speculation around the iPhone 6 screens, is that Apple has been making a conscious effort to push developers away from using pixels as a unit of measurement and move them towards points. If a developer codes an application to display a single point on the screen, this could be a single pixel on lower resolution devices (such as the current iPad mini), or four pixels in a 2×2 configuration on higher resolution screens. While these are different pixel sizes, it allows Apple to set recommended minimums for screen elements in terms of point size across all iOS devices, rather than different minimums for different form factors.

This ties in with Apple’s subtle indications from WWDC that developers should not consider the screen of an iOS device as having a fixed size or ratio. Using points reduces  much of the work in scaling a UI to be usable on any screen. The recent beta releases of Xcode have allowed any resolution to be set manually, rather than the fixed options of the iOS range (which had been the case with previous releases of Xcode).

The screen resolutions proposed by Gruber also introduces a ’3x retina resolution’ for the 5.5 inch iPhone Phablet. I’m sure the marketing department will love to talk about the iPhone with the highest quality screen that Apple has ever delivered. At 461 pixels per inch, it would be a monster:

…everything would be amazingly sharp. At that point it would be difficult for most of us to perceive individual pixels from any viewing distance, not just from typical practical viewing distance. This would be so sweet, I’d wager Apple comes up with a new marketing name for it: super-retina or something.

The smart iOS developers will have been working with the beta releases of iOS 8 since WWDC this year to have apps ready to go at the launch of the iPhone 6 range. They may be waiting to see what the new screen resolutions are before committing development costs to graphical assists or doing a final polish on the UI. The very smart developers will already have their own application frameworks set up to work with points rather than pixels, and to adapt automatically with different screen sizes and screen resolutions.

The actual resolution is important, but the thinking behind how the resolution is addressed by app developers, web designers, and others, is perhaps more important given the impact the iPhone 6 will have in the digital space.

We’re about to see a lot more on our iOS devices. We don’t have long to wait to find out who is right, who is adaptable, and which third-party developers will make the smart business decisions around the launch of the new hardware.