Would be great to add 4" size of iPhone 5/5s/5c to the illustration.
iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#12I wonder if it will be possible to opt-in to 1:1 pixel rendering on the iPhone6+ after all, particularly for opengl/metal/video playback. It seems the downscale hack is mostly required for UIKit backwards compatibility and to maintain approximately equal physical sizes for UI elements only.
Very nice visualization in the OP, by the way!
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#13I know it's dangerous to armchair speculate about Apple's moves, but it really seems like they should have held out for a true 3x screen instead of compromising on a 1080p. I certainly would never buy the 6+ after reading about their cheesy resolution hack. It feels rushed and short term.
Keep in mind that it's resampling a 3x image. Display scaling already looks acceptable on retina MacBook Pros [1], and the 6+'s screen is much more high-resolution than that. I agree that this sounds like a terrible idea on paper, but it might not be so bad in practice.
1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#14This fuss about the iPhone screens is, to me at least, hilarious. A good part of my career has been being the "Android guy" in organisations where for better or worse the products would de facto lead on iOS. The number one headache was designers pushing "pixel perfect design" which is doable on Android, but is a pointless headache when your tiny screen is 720p or higher. The fact Apple have a phone coming out for whi…
OTOH, iOS 7 did a fine job of almost entirely removing bitmaps from iOS in advance of these new screens. So developers are in a lot better shape now than if they had to redraw all their skeumorphic assets at 3x.
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#15(1) Is it really a problem that apps can't be pixel perfect on the 6+? How unsharp are we talking about? Are there workarounds such as device detection and an additional set of image assets?
(2) Will Apple aim to re-enable pixel-perfection in next year's iPhone release? Was this just a stopgap measure due to yield challenges inherent to display manufacturing?
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#16This fuss about the iPhone screens is, to me at least, hilarious. A good part of my career has been being the "Android guy" in organisations where for better or worse the products would de facto lead on iOS. The number one headache was designers pushing "pixel perfect design" which is doable on Android, but is a pointless headache when your tiny screen is 720p or higher. The fact Apple have a phone coming out for whi…
Since the points are rendered in pixel-perfect form and then down sampled on the iPhone 6+, the only potential loss of fidelity is in the downsampling step. Since we're in an age of not even being able to see pixels, there should be no fidelity loss. The image displayed will be rendered at a higher resolution than the display, and thus every pixel on the ultimate display will be "perfect". Back when pixels were big enough to see, I was one of those "pixel perfect" people too. You had to get it right, or the error was noticeable. With retina displays, this is much less of an issue. (to me at least)
I have seen android devices advertised with 4k displays at a 4-5" diagonal form actor. That doesn't make sense to me, because beyond 300dpi there isn't much point in higher pixel density. Yes, it makes sense for Apple to choose this size display (as 1080p is a commodity size).
The real issue is, if you want to compare the platforms, which platform has better resolution independence support.
I won't criticize android on this, but I will say that the iOS reliance on PNGs has gone on way too long. 2x was a decent solution for photographs... but we should have moved to SVG or some vector format as a native format in iOS several years ago.
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#17I wonder if it will be possible to opt-in to 1:1 pixel rendering on the iPhone6+ after all, particularly for opengl/metal/video playback. It seems the downscale hack is mostly required for UIKit backwards compatibility and to maintain approximately equal physical sizes for UI elements only. Very nice visualization in the OP, by the way!
There must be a way. Otherwise the samples they have shown in the keynote of the landscape mail with the split view or the "enhanced" CNN sample app would never work as in the default mode outlined in this infographic, the screen can't possibly offer any more real estate for UI than the smaller screens, but the samples in the keynote were clearly showing more UI content.
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#18I know it's dangerous to armchair speculate about Apple's moves, but it really seems like they should have held out for a true 3x screen instead of compromising on a 1080p. I certainly would never buy the 6+ after reading about their cheesy resolution hack. It feels rushed and short term.
I think it's actually pretty clever. Developers clearly have trouble writing apps to support arbitrary scale factors. Resolution independence was supposed to be a feature of Windows since Vista was codenamed "Longhorn" (before 2004), and Windows is still a mess on higher-DPI screens 10 years later. Making it so developers only have to think about 1x and 2x and 3x makes the task easier.
Also, look at it this way: with the diminishing returns of resolutions above 300 dpi, is it really a big deal that you won't get the absolute best use of the iPhone 6+'s 400 dpi? Seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off to use that extra resolution in a way that makes resolution-independence easier for developers.
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#19Stupid question, but why the point resolution for the iphone 6+ isn't a perfect divider of the pixel resolutions like it is for the other iphones?
Since there is more than one point resolution anyway.
And also, how is it different for android devices?
Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
#20I wonder if it will be possible to opt-in to 1:1 pixel rendering on the iPhone6+ after all, particularly for opengl/metal/video playback. It seems the downscale hack is mostly required for UIKit backwards compatibility and to maintain approximately equal physical sizes for UI elements only. Very nice visualization in the OP, by the way!
There must be a way. Otherwise the samples they have shown in the keynote of the landscape mail with the split view or the "enhanced" CNN sample app would never work as in the default mode outlined in this infographic, the screen can't possibly offer any more real estate for UI than the smaller screens, but the samples in the keynote were clearly showing more UI content.
The samples with the wide split screen are rendered at 1242x2208 (3x 414x736, which is larger than any other iphone which is either 320x568 or 375x667) - and then downscaled. My question was really about whether is it possible for software to render framebuffers at 1080x1920 (3x 360x640) - perhaps bypassing UIKit completely.