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Screen resolution of 1136x640

Why on earth would they go 144x80 pixels shy of 720p, 1280x720?

Hasn't the world suffered enough from transcoding? So the eye sees your perfect DPI, but the pixels are going to be imperfect because it's a random down-sample size that doesn't divide anything standard.

I don't get it.



1136 means adding 88 screen pixels, which is 44 x 2.

44 is a magic number in iOS development. All navigation bars are 44px tall. All tap targets are recommended to be at least this size. It's very easy for developers to conceptualize 88 more vertical pixels and what to do with them; much easier to work with.

And let's face it, iOS is about the apps over watching videos. I'm sure 16:9 videos will look great.


Devs would have a completely new resolution. This maintains compatibility without having a ton of black bars around the screen. And yes, I realize it letterboxes with older apps. But I don't want vertical black bars too.


"Older apps" = "everything made up until about 45 minutes ago"?


Well, yes. Basically. It's just like the Retina display release.


They could have scaled it in one direction and keep the black bars only on one side. It is really silly not to use 1280x720.


> They could have scaled it in one direction

Yes, I'm sure "blurry as fuck" is what people look for in a backward compatibility feature. With 2:1 already dodgy, 9:8 scaling would have flown really well


So you want them to do the very thing you are complaining about with not having 720p? I don't know about you, but I use my phone for apps more than watching 720p video and I'd rather not have my email be blurry...


This is to preserve backwards compatibility with existing apps. It is unlikely anyone could see the difference between 1280x720 and 1136x640 on a 4 inch screen. Also that "small difference" is 27% more pixels.


I would be shocked if the difference between 720p native and slightly-downsampled 720p is really noticable on a screen that physically small.

Edit to clarify: for video. Videos and photos scale oh-so-much-nicer than pages of static text.


It's the same width as the older iPhones.


Since it's keeping the same width and that most apps are used in portrait mode, they just need to make sure they adapt to the longer screen.

For a lot of apps, it could mean doing nothing at all, since the typical app has a navigation bar at the top, which won't change, a list view which will just stretch longer and show more cells, and a tab navigation at the bottom, which won't change either.

Of course, this won't work for all apps, but at least it will work for many, whereas going for 720p, will make pretty much nothing work out of the box.


This is the biggest WTF for me too.




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