So you believe the new iPhone will be 16:9.
Can you provide some specific counterarguments to those presented in the Gizmodo article.
Yeah. Let's see...
Battery impact
But let's keep on going with this scenario and assume Apple's suppliers can secretly produce a 367ppi, 4-inch 720p 16:9 display by shredding virgin unicorn ponies and compressing them inside their secret artificial black hole. What will be the cost in terms of battery life? As with the iPad, the impact of this display in the battery life of the iPhone would be monumental, thanks to the increase in graphic power demands, pixel activation, and backlighting.
Would you be happy to switch black bars in TV series for less battery life or a thicker, heavier iPhone? I'm sure Apple wouldn't like to make that trade-off.
It's going to be 1136x640, versus the current 960x640. It means that the new iPhone is going to have 1.18 times the pixels of the current 4S. It's less than a 20% increase. The new iPad went through a 400% increase, included an high-power GPU, and managed to retain the same battery life.
Fragmentation
That new screen format would also introduce fragmentation into a platform that doesn't have any right now. Zero. None. One iPhone format to rule them all will suddenly be divided and Apple will suddenly lose one of its key advantages over Android
Developers would have to rework all of their apps to work in both the new 16:9 phone and the huge installed base. There are gazillion units of iPhones 3G, 3GS, 4 and 4S out there. And their owners all keep buying new apps. A sudden change in aspect ratio will double developer costs for years to come. And, like I said before, letterboxing old apps is not a good option. They will look like crap and defeat the whole purpose.
So, for years to come, developers would have to maintain two user interface layouts, greatly increasing their costs. This is not like creating new higher resolution art to accomodate the increased density of the Retina display. That's easy. Making new layouts for all current and future applications, however, would be much more dramatic.
Current apps are going to work just fine. They are going to perfectly fit in the new screen, leaving a 176 pixel blank on the bottom of the screen, which can be used for whatever Apple sees fit. Normal applications are going to be easy as hell to optimize for the new screen, as well.
The iPad conflict
The iPad and the iPhone have different aspect ratios now. 4:3 vs. 3:2. That's not much of a problem, as the iPad apps have completely different layouts. It's also not a big difference. Games, which are the apps that are more similar between platformsare easily adaptable for both aspect ratios.
But, if the iPhone goes 16:9 for the sake of adopting the 720p standard, it would make sense for the iPad to go 16:9or somewhere near thattoo. If you adopt one logic to one product, you may as well adopt it for the other.
The problem is that a 16:9 iPad would be absolutely ridiculous.
This simply makes no sense. An iPhone is an iPhone, and an iPad is an iPad. If the iPhone changes aspect ratio, I don't see how the iPad should be affected, especially as it just changed its resolution on the last refresh.
Steve's golden goose
That's an idea that was repeated many times by Steve Jobs. Heand Tim Cook, for that matterexpressed his disgust with the 16:9 format one the iPad and the iPhone, saying that it doesn't make much sense from a design point of view. Except for movies, it's a format that doesn't bring much benefit. And it's actively bad for things like books and magazines.
If we're talking about iBooks, you can fit more lines of text in an higher resolution, no matter what the ratio is. If we're talking about magazines... come on, who reads magazines on the iPhone? Besides, they can fit the same magazine pages as they could on an iPhone 4S screen, and use the leftover space for navigation controls or whatever they want.
The iPhone and the iPad, as Jobs said, happened after many years of brainstorming, planning and development. At the time, they truly believed they had found the magic formula. The market agreed and still agrees. Despite the variety of formats in the Android platform, despite the fact that big screen smartphones have found an audience, iOS keeps selling more and more, its sales increasing at a staggering rate. Even after so many years in the market, Apple's formula keeps winning.
This one makes even less sense. It's delirious.
Sometimes, Gizmodo simply does not have a clue. They convince themselves that something is true and try to prove it taking it seriously and writing articles with a convincing tone, stating things that can't hold any ground. Apple was capable of mass producing 960x640x3.5" screens in 2010, and now they say that 1136x640x4" would hinder performance and battery life, and would require unicorn dust to be produced? Please.
BTW of course it is a TV thing. Networks are about to be slammed. 30% of network traffic is already Netflix and they don't even fund the bandwidth. At least Apple tries to pave the way for servers, end use devices and network contracts. They haul their own weight.
