
Why 960 x 640 - fogus
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_960_by_640
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mortenjorck
I really do think Gruber's going to have to eat his own chowder on this one.

There's just no precedent for Apple doing this. They've never played the
resolution game. Remember 15" laptops a few years ago? While Sony and other
higher-end makers started cramming more pixels in each year, Apple slowly went
from 1280x854 to 1440x900 and stopped there. Only in 2010 have they started to
offer (and only as a BTO option!) the 1680x1050 res that you've been able to
get on Vaios for years. Apple just prefers to concentrate on their
antialiasing algorithms than to pump pixels.

I think a much more likely resolution bump would be 1.5x each dimension for
720x480. It'll be a little short of HTC and Motorola's 852x480, but if Apple
doesn't cut the color resolution with a Bayer pattern, their display will
still look better. And most importantly, it'll use less memory and run faster
than a full 960x480.

~~~
modeless
A 1.5x scale factor would make existing apps look terrible. They will look
fine scaled 2x. If they increase the resolution (and they will; the recently
leaked prototype is irrefutable proof) they must increase it 2x for this
reason alone.

~~~
mortenjorck
1.5x would indeed look bad for "legacy" apps, but I think even this fits in to
Apple's current developer strategy: Update or get left behind.

I mean, remember, Apple was willing just recently here to risk the incredible
backlash of 3.3.1 for the sake of platform direction. I think they'll gladly
risk developers complaining about redrawing UI bitmaps.

~~~
mattparcher
I think 3.3.1 is primarily a developer issue, whereas resolution is very much
a user-facing issue as well.

With the iPad, Apple didn't force developers to recode their iPhone apps,
instead it allowed the older apps to run at native or double resolution.
Granted, the double resolution doesn't look pretty, and Apple is strongly
encouraging developers to produce iPad native apps, but they definitely seem
to be taking advantage of their 185,000 app head start, and 1.5x would
presumably look even worse on an iPad than 2x.

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serhei
"I believe the on-screen typography on the next-gen iPhones will be
indistinguishable, or nearly so, from high-quality print."

... except that high-quality print doesn't use Marker Felt...

~~~
derefr
Conversely, no one typesets their throw-away napkin notes.

~~~
serhei
Hey, are you insinuating that I use tacky handwriting on tacky yellow paper,
with a tacky felt marker?

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orangecat
Amusing fact: 960x640 is exactly the same number of pixels as a 1024x600
netbook, in a much saner aspect ratio.

~~~
WildUtah
I feel like they're eventually going to try to sell me a laptop with a
2048x100 pixel screen where I have to read one very long line of text at a
time. What is wrong with laptop screen manufacturers? I haven't bought a
notebook in years from anyone but Dell (upgraded screen each time) and Apple
(generally saner than other manufacturers).

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glhaynes
When I realized we're only a resolution doubling or two away from being beyond
the limits of human visual perception, I realized why the much-discussed
Resolution Independence feature keeps not making it into each release of Mac
OS X.

~~~
dcurtis
I think it's funny how no one has noticed that the iPhone/iPad SDK essentially
has resolution independence built-in. All the Interface Builder default
controls are vectorized and can scale beautifully.

~~~
Zev
Except that if you want to use an image (say, on a button), you're still stuck
with rasterized types. The only way to have resolution independence for
buttons would be to use custom Quartz drawing.

There's no SVG or no PDF support in UIImage; the only part of the SDK that
supports SVG is UIWebView. And Quartz PDF support is more suited for
displaying pages of PDF's, not small images in a button.

~~~
DLWormwood

        There's no SVG or no PDF support in UIImage; the only
        part of the SDK that supports SVG is UIWebView. And
        Quartz PDF support is more suited for displaying pages
        of PDF's, not small images in a button.
    

This.

I'm currently working on an iP* app, and I had to roll my own UIView class to
handle PDF pages to provide vector imaging without resorting to a heavyweight
web view.

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algolicious
Gruber ignores the Droid, which has sold far more units than the N1, does not
have the Pentile subpixel reduction, and has an 854x480 display. A 960x640
display would rock but given that the LCD is smaller than current iPhones, I
think it will be a 1.5x increase which will look fine with antialiasing and
font/UI element scaling. So 480x720.

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wrs
It doesn't matter what the resolution is; until they get some typographical
taste, it's not going to rival print. iBooks looks like [insert rude word] and
it's not because of the resolution.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
full justification without hyphenation -- barf!

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frou_dh
So what's the deal with the iPad? It deserves to have this great text fidelity
(i.e. insane PPI) just as much as the iPhone.

Is the 2nd generation iPad going to have a significantly better screen?

~~~
gfodor
$500

~~~
DenisM
Also, 10 hours of (promised) battery life. more pixels are not only mor
expensive to switch, they are also more expensive to render the UI for.

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shalmanese
Everyone who has been following Apple closely for more than 10 years knows
that 300+ dpi on every device has always been Apple's goal. They haven't
pushed it in OSX due to the massive legacy effects. The Mac typographic layout
system was designed for a 300 dpi future.

------
Timothee
tl;dr Because 960x640 will give a picture quality (in particular for texts)
comparable to high-quality prints.

But that's not much of an answer. Why higher resolution? Because it will look
better. Why 960x640 precisely? Because it's exactly 4 times the current
resolution. But beyond that…

I guess I'm missing a more insightful conclusion like: "since Apple is putting
iBooks on the iPhone, they want to make it a decent e-reader".

~~~
lurch_mojoff
_Why higher resolution?_

Because competing devices have higher density displays. And high density
allows for prettier, crisper, more natural graphics. iBooks are just the icing
on the cake.

 _Why 960x640 precisely?_

Because it makes things simple. Whether you have a bitmap or some procedural
drawing (vector if you will) you can easily translate it into coordinates on
the new screen - just multiply by 2. No need to worry about sub-pixel drawing
and artifacts occurring as result of rounding errors.

~~~
Timothee
These questions were actually rhetorical. (I actually answered them, though in
less detail)

The thing is that I was kind of surprised by the length of the post compared
to the relative lack of insight. Usually John Gruber brings interesting points
and reflection to his posts, going in depth on a lot of his arguments; but
with "Why 960x640" as a title, I was hoping to read something I didn't know or
didn't think about. Here he mostly stated facts without, in my opinion, really
answering the question "why does an iPhone need a higher resolution/pixel
density?".

~~~
cwp
Well, there's this: "The next-gen iPhone is shooting for that caliber of
resolution — not merely to exceed the resolution of competing devices, but to
rival the optical quality of print." He doesn't belabour it, because it's
obvious: high quality text is really pleasant to look at, and that will sell
more iPhones.

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martythemaniak
This was by far the easiest thing to see coming to the 2010 iPhone.
[http://martin.drashkov.com/2009/12/iphone-4g-predictions.htm...](http://martin.drashkov.com/2009/12/iphone-4g-predictions.html)

I recently ported my company's iPhone app to Android (they both have the same
look, rather than using each platform's look) and the difference between the
two images side by side when testing on the Nexus One was striking. Quite
simply, Apple could not have gone into the 2010 holiday season against Android
phones with spectacular, dense 4" displays.

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jheriko
Seems that the important question has not been answered. You may want the
iPhone to have the same quality as print, but why? Is iPhone competing with
magazines now? Do Apple customers want that, and would they be happy to pay
for it?

Probably... the brand and marketing is so strong Apple could probably reduce
the resolution of the screen and charge more for it. The fact that its the new
iPhone would be enough to make up for it.

~~~
sketerpot
If you use a really high resolution screen for a while, every lesser screen
looks bad in comparison. It's the expectations ratchet.

~~~
mhw
Agree. I wouldn't have entertained switching from my previous or current
laptops (1400x1050 and 1680x1050 pixels respectively) to a 15" MacBook Pro
with a lower resolution screen. The recent refresh suddenly makes them more
tempting though.

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zmmmmm
Whatever the actual resolution is, the iP* line definitely needs the upgrade.
It's amazing how "fuzzy" everything looks when I switch from my N1 back to my
iPod Touch. It makes a very noticeable difference when displaying and reading
web sites.

I'm sure if it wasn't for Apple's amazing design skills this would have made
their devices look outclassed long ago, but because everything is so
beautifully done they have gotten away with 320x480 well past its use by date.

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jacabado
Wondering about what will be Apple's next big product ...

Internet TV?? OMG!

iPad will rule the world because of the Internet TV!! iPad will be the perfect
interface for controlling a TFT on steroids, and the target markets fits so
well it makes a lot of sense. Does anybody agree to me?

I see the iPad as an enabling device, it's ease of use and hipness will create
a big market on the less technology savy.

~~~
jacabado
Could you at least verbally disagree? It's the reasoning wrong?

The style is provocative but just to get some attention to the idea.

