Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Bigger is better, period, they say, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial

Does anyone really say that? My feeling is the 3.5" display is a very good size but so is 4-4.3" especially if you have poor eyesight, big hands, or fat American fingers. We have 4 different sizes of MacBook and no one is going to argue 3 of them should be discontinued because it's just too hard to choose or 13" is perfect for everyone. Two iPhone sizes (big and small) is going to happen eventually. There are too many 4-4.3" phones being sold to ignore that market forever. My guess is Apple is waiting until they can bump the resolution of the 3.5" display to the point where it can scale up to 4-4.3" and still maintain 300+ DPI. One resolution for both models.

I can’t help but see Siri as Apple’s first attack in the direction of Google’s crown jewels: search.

I couldn't agree more with this. Someday Apple will make a deal with FaceBook and things will get very interesting.

Siri, What movies have my friends recommended lately?

Siri, What is the name of that book Tom recommended to me last month? Great. Can you buy that for me?

Siri, Do you know Paul's wife's name?

Siri, Where did Paul and Linda go on vacation last year? How much would a weeks stay cost? Great. Book it for the 2nd week of August and send Paul a message asking for suggestions of good restaurants.

Based on the demos this is all very possible if Apple can get its hands on the data.

The most important question involved with increasing the screen size is what the story for developers is. Increasing the screen size from 3.5" to 4+ inches would cause many many apps to be rewritten. Yes, you could just scale apps up and they would work a lot better than they do scaled up on the iPad, but even scaling them a little would change the physical size of buttons and text etc. that were all designed to be a different physical size. That means definitely doing new artwork for this third physical size, but in some cases, it probably means doing a slightly different design! With a bigger screen, maybe you could squeeze an extra button on your toolbar. That means that an app developer has to manage three different versions of their app (iPhone, iPhone+, iPad) with two of them being very similar. That adds complexity and the possibility for bugs.

Why would Apple want to impose that extra workload on itself and its developers?

How is it different than on various sized Mac products?

OS X != iOS

Simple as that.

That's because OS X apps don't run full screen by default.

The bigger screen doesn't meant that the app looks bigger – it just means that you can accommodate more things on screen at once.

Why would Apple want to impose that extra workload on itself and its developers?

Maybe they won't but it seems to me they can't stay (only) at 3.5" or 960x640 forever. I think it might be quite sometime before we see a 1920x1280 display to allow for the clever pixel doubling trick again.

1152x768 @ 3.5" / 395 DPI

1152x768 @ 4.3" / 321 DPI

Yeah but everything would physically be bigger, like it was zoomed. Would be very odd and seem like it was too big. You wouldn't gain any real estate.

I think that's part of the allure of larger screens. Most of the 4-4.5" Android phones don't even match the resolution of the iPhone 4's display at this point. Things are just physically larger and easier to see and tap.

The other possibility is to acknowledge that the Retina display's dot pitch is actually quite a bit better than it has to be. I wouldn't mind 15% larger pixel dimensions if it means a 15% larger screen.

I'm sure that Facebook isn't ignorant to this.

When two companies' enemies are aligned, allies they should be. Or something to that effect.

A nice way to test your assumptions here is to pretend that you have perfect voice recognition of the above input already working, then figure out what software you need to write in order to answer all of the above questions.

Does the tech to answer those questions (especially the ones with follow up and references) already exist? If so then this might become a reality soon.

If you see some issues with parsing those sentences when they're input as strings then those issues will not magically go away with perfect speech recognition.

Can you answer all those questions with state of the art software?

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