Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

ALL iPhone generations released so far have a CSS pixel width of 320 pixels. But the iPhone 6 is the first to change this. It looks like Apple is finally bumping this up! This means a bit more text can fit on each line when holding the phone vertically for websites using <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">:

- iPhone 6 is 1334x750: CSS pixel width is likely 375px (pixel ratio = 2)

- iPhone 6 Plus is 1920x1080: CSS pixel width is likely either 432px (pixel ratio = 2.5) or 360px (pixel ratio = 3). It would make sense to implement a ratio of 2.5 as it would be 15.2% more CSS pixels for a screen 17.0% wider. But on the other hand (1) Apple designers are perfectionists and a fractional ratio means an image slightly less sharp, and (2) maybe with the Plus model Apple wants to attract smartphone buyers who dislike tiny text on a tiny display so it would make sense to provide fewer CSS pixels on a bigger screen... I am really curious to know which way they went.

This all needs to be confirmed with a device in hands...

I wonder how this will affect many of the apps where devs have hard coded the screen resolution and depend on the current DPI. The iPhone 4 doubled the DPI and the resolution so that it would be fairly seamless to devs. The iPhone 5 made the screen a bit wider but kept the same DPI. It looks like the iPhone 6 changes both DPI and resolution so this might break many existing apps.

BTW, a quick review of Gruber's analysis.

http://daringfireball.net/2014/08/larger_iphone_display_conj...

Spot on for the 6, off for the 6+. So what does this mean for 6+ users and developers?

With hindsight, I don't think a resolution higher than 1080p was ever an option for Apple.

Wasn't the original Retina display touted close to the limit of human perception ?

Regardless of marketingspeak, higher resolution displays have unclear benefits, since possibly people won't notice difference in sharpness, and clear drawbacks, as increased battery consumption:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/lg-g3-review-a-great-...

Regardless, it seems that Gruber was partly right:

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/50943816728054988...

This is going to throw advertising firms into an epic tizzy. The de facto mobile web ad size has been standardized around the 320px (320x50 usually) width of portrait iPhones since basically the dawn of smartphone advertising. Now suddenly they have 3 widths to worry about just for iPhone.

We've been showing 320x ads on wider Androids just fine...

By blowing them up or centering them at 1.0 scale?

The latter for me, I don't know about others.

If those firms couldn't foresee a resolution ratio change "sometime in the future", that their own fault for not being on top of their game.

Wait, why does the smaller variant have a larger CSS pixel-width? Wouldn't it make sense for the 6 Plus to allow for more text?

At 400 DPI, the image will probably be sharp even with a fractional pixel ratio.

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