IPhone 5: Apple’s 16:9 compromise

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/136164-iphone-5-apples-169-compromise

by ukdm • 14 years ago

33 68 14 years ago

"...These fixed ratios/resolutions are one of the main reasons for Apple’s strong app ecosystem."

Oh right. Silly me thought is was the SDK, the link with iTunes, paid Apps, the link with Credit Cards, the high quality designs and what not.

indiecore• 14 years ago

>one of the

albemuth• 14 years ago

>one of the main

myko• 14 years ago

> Will developers have to maintain multiple versions of each app, just like on Android? Apple has been very quiet on this matter.

What? I've been an Android developer for years and never had to do this. I'm pretty sure it will be the same way on iOS as it is on Android - provide another layout (a different xib in this case) for the larger and smaller screens. Done.

gardarh• 14 years ago

I don't agree with you on that point. Android layouts are designed from the beginning to handle different screen sizes and proportions, pretty much like html. One of the iPhone's strong point has always been that you can design "pixel perfect" apps, so that your design is exactly what users see (as a contrast in Android you have to define "points of stretching" for your screens).

The point here is that you have to create a new layout for the iPhone 5 (if you don't want your app letterboxed) and this adds an extra layer of complexity to the development. Seeing that there are also rumors about a different form factor iPad you would then have to maintain 6 different layouts (standard/retina/16:9 for iPhone, standard/retina/new layout iPad). Well or 12 if you have specific landscape layouts.

Designing UI on Android apps can be a pain since you don't have the "pixel perfect" paradigm, which is a common criticism on Android from iPhone developers, but if you manage to get them right you can get away with a single xml layout (of course, you can able to make things more complicated).

It seems to me that Apple are getting themselves in a bit of a mess with this. The tradeoffs with the "pixel perfect" method haven't really materialized until now.

Maybe I'm just being over pessimistic with this and it will be a non-issue, I really can't tell at this point, but I see this as the greatest issue with the iPhone 5 (which in turn is probably the reason they didn't increase the screen size earlier).

_djo_• 14 years ago

While things are undoubtedly more complex for designers and developers than when there was just a standard 3.5" 320×480 163 ppi screen, a number of those layouts are transitionary.

Just as developers slowly phase out support for older iOS versions (and by extension older devices), within a year or two it'll be possible to maintain only two layouts for the iPhone (retina 3.5" and 4"), two for the iPad (standard, retina) and one for the presumed iPad mini.

In time they'll be able to abandon both the 3.5" retina and standard iPad layouts and revert back to just one iPhone layout, one iPad layout and one iPad mini layout (assuming that's a real product) as the older models become obsolete.

It's not ideal, but it's still a relatively simple set of layouts that allow the 'pixel-perfect' method to continue working well.

CookWithMe• 14 years ago

I chuckled at this too. But a lot of iOS devs have been complaining that Android development is comparably hard because of the different screen sizes... well, there you go.

gte910h2• 14 years ago

iOS has always had different screen sizes: When someone tethered or in a call, the app dropped several pixels of vertical real estate.

Now, many apps didn't handle this, but this is really "more of stuff you should have been doing", not really "tons more work for iOS devs.

evilduck• 14 years ago

I know it sounds a bit apologetic for Apple, but like HTML, variable width is generally a bigger design problem than variable height.

username3• 14 years ago

iOS 6 has auto layout.

bookwormAT• 14 years ago

The difference is Android was from the ground up designed for adaptive design and multiple screen sizes. AFAIK most apps on iOS use fixed pixel sizes and positions.

saturdaysaint• 14 years ago

The article doesn't mention the updates to iOS 6, in dev hands for months, that allow for flexible layouts. I'd be surprised if any major 3rd party apps (Facebook Netflix Kindle Dropbox Spotify) weren't ready at launch. We'll see for games.

But, really, iOS has survived far bigger transitions.

I owned the first retina iPhone (4) at launch and apps were upgraded so quickly that I can barely remember using non-retina apps on it.

Many early iPad adopters ran at least some upscaled iPhone apps on it for months while developers caught up to a vastly different medium - a hideous compromise compared to letterboxing. Was that even a speedbump on the iPad's rise to blockbuster status?

So this strikes me as completely academic.

fmkamchatka• 14 years ago

The problem with the autolayout is that it only works on iOS6 devices, so developers still need to use the old way until they can drop ioS5 support.

That being said it is very easy to support the new iPhone the old way.

s00pcan• 14 years ago

I really don't consider this a compromise; everyone else is pointlessly making screens larger in both directions that can't be used comfortably with one hand. The marketers just want to have that 4"+ screen on the feature list. Making the screen taller but keeping the same width was the best way of increasing the size but still keeping it usable.

LaGrange• 14 years ago

Actually, I doubt the additional row of icons makes a huge difference (though, maybe it does help videos), but I bet the additional space inside the phone is useful.

mongol• 14 years ago

Good point!

evoxed• 14 years ago

I just want to be able to read more text at a time... seems like every time I open an email or webpage, at any comfortable size I get less text than I can read in a few blinks. I won't know until it's in my hand, but the extra height and fullscreen Safari sound pretty great to me (also, more room for my hands to make those damn pinching motions– the tall and large communities will appreciate it).

bane4• 14 years ago

"The end result, though, despite Apple’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, is a phone that is reactionary rather than revolutionary, or even evolutionary."

I've been struggling with the right word to describe this update and "reactionary" hits the nail on the head. Almost everything this phone has, the competition has had for quite some time. It doesn't quite feel like catchup, with typical panache Apple has built a best-in-class phone design. But it just doesn't feel like something anybody wants to be chasing any more.

Bigger picture, I'm not sure what this means for the smartphone ecosystem as a whole w.r.t. innovation. The heat of competition feels like it's finally let off.

iProject• 14 years ago

> doesn't feel like something anybody wants to be chasing any more

A reasonable speculation. Of course the best data will take a while to become available.

The one data point (showing in headlines this morning) is that, judging that it took only 1 hour for iP5 shipping time to move back from 1 week to 2 weeks, this phone is selling several times as fast as any iPhone predecessor.

Apparently some body is "chasing it."

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

Just because something sells well doesn't tell us everything. It's a good data point though.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240080531/Windows-Vista-...

bradleyland2• 14 years ago

Even the very first iPhone was "reactionary". It wasn't a class leader if you're looking at it from a bulleted-list perspective. The first iPhone was EDGE only at a time when everyone was clammmoring for 3G phones, and it wouldn't run third-party apps. Many feature phones can run third-party apps; albeit crappy ones. The iPhone couldn't run third-party apps for a full year after its release. Talk about reactionary!

The tech press does the same thing every time a new iPhone is released. They look at it on paper and say dumb things like:

> Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful phone, and in true Apple fashion its design and construction are probably second to none… but is that really enough?

So, there is no other phone that can beat its design and construction, but "is it enough"? Is being the best enough?

That has to go down as one of the dumbest, most contradictory rhetorical questions in history.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Consumers don't care about implementation details. They care about the experience, and year after year, Apple delivers the best experience (proved by JD Power's smartphone satisfaction results).

cooldeal4• 14 years ago

>So, there is no other phone that can beat its design and construction, but "is it enough"? Is being the best enough?

The Nokia N9, Lumia 800, 900 and 920 are pretty well built and designed too. If you haven't, try going to a store and playing with one.

Coming to the design itself, it's tied in with fashion and at this point the design has not changed(except for the new back) since the iPhone 4 over 2 years ago. Design and fashion do age. The iPhone 4's design was a leap over the 3GS and combined with other features warranted a new version number, while this iteration feels that it should've been named iPhone 4X, X for extra long. Why get a new iPhone 5 when you already have an iPhone 4 or 4S and can add a Galaxy or Lumia and keep the old phone around as a iPod Touch music player?

Also, even if the design is superlative and timeless, for many consumers it is just one factor. The other factors are raw power, technical specs, camera quality and features(which the Lumia 920 is going to have a head start on). If the iPhone 5 cannot compete on specs with this years phones, what chance does it have with the Android phones of the next year?

However, there's another bigger factor that I previously commented on:

I think their problem right now is that users' choice is overwhelming them and the one-size-fits-all approach of the iPhone has diminishing returns after a point. The variety, choice of screen sizes and price ranges of the competition is only getting better by the day.

A new iPhone is released only once a year, so it better be very good with a lot of new technologies, features, new designs etc. for sales to last all through the next year. iPhone 4S sales started lagging in the 3Q itself this year, compared to the 4th quarter for the iPhone 4. This is because people start waiting for the next version or switch to the competition because they have better specced devices with more features. I think Samsung timed their Galaxy S3 launch perfectly to coincide with the iPhone 4S getting old enough to beat, and they beat it in monthly sales for the first time, which is a noteworthy thing in itself.

The whole situation is reminding me of the PC wars in the 80s, where Apple had a seemingly unassailable innovation lead, and then squandered it away by offering limited choice and higher prices, while Microsoft very smartly licensed DOS to Compaq and others like Dell and HP, and the rest is history. Apple's marketshare is now 17% vs. Android's 67% which is about 4 times more. No wonder Apple is going crazy with the patent war against Android. That's probably their only weapon against the equivalent of the attack of the hordes of beige boxes' that previously took them down.

The iPhone 5 is good enough to get great sales and beat all sales records ever, but the key is how well it does starting about 6 months from now.

bane4• 14 years ago

"Is being the best enough?"

I was speaking about industrial design.

In most markets and in most segments it isn't enough.

The Toyota Camry is the best selling car in America but it doesn't compare design-wise to a Porsche or a BMW...hell the best selling vehicle in the U.S. in a pickup truck.

Design is a very important differentiation point, and it certainly adds to sales, but it doesn't appear to be enough to dominate an entire market in the general sense.

Sales figures in the mobile space seem to indicate that while consumers like and appreciate top-notch industrial design, there are other factors that come into play. I don't think the iPhone 5 is dominant in those other factors to makeup for a ho-hum design update.

majormajor• 14 years ago

IMO, Phones have been pretty much commodities feature-wise for at least two or three years. The iPhone was the first modern smartphone, and I'd call the 260+ ppi Droid the first "truly modern" smartphone. Apple leapfrogged that screen density a bit further with the iPhone 4, but the usability/readability jump for text was biggest in that first jump made by the Droid.

There aren't any current truly game-changing features out there. Heck, despite missing free turn-by-turn navigation for years (and there being much complaining about this from iPhone users) iPhones still sold in ever-increasing numbers. Even if the geek crowd is feeling like the iPhone is increasingly just more of the same, I think it'll take a long to for that feeling to permeate the masses. And it would probably take some serious marketing/design failures on Apple's part for it to happen any time quickly. So while Android's carving out a ton of sales in the cheaper/free-smartphone area, Apple still has a ton of mindshare as the premium smartphone for heavy users, which further drives development of the latest apps to be targeted for iOS first, etc. (And that's without mentioning the iPad sales beast.)

But unless someone figures out something truly novel to do with NFC or whatever other new features introduced, people aren't going to care much. Right now those features look promising to people in the know, but they're still far from essential.

Apple gets some more help in the US with the subsidy situation—for instance, on AT&T, the new-customer unsubsidized price of the 16GB S3 is $100 less than the 16GB iPhone 5, but the two year contract one is the same price. The One X is $200 less unsubsidized, but only $100 less with a two year contract. Some quick searching makes it appear that the S3 was only $50 less than the current iPhone 5 price unsubsidized at initial launch, but that's still a nice little trick on Apple's part to have AT&T sell a pricier phone for the same price.

gte910h2• 14 years ago

It's a very very pretty screen. People are going to be chasing that.

jeffehobbs• 14 years ago

My understanding is that if the dev is using standard Interface Builder UITableView elements, it's a pretty easy transition. If your whole UI is non-standard, like a game UI for example, yeah, there's going to be some slight pain if you want to allot for the additional screen space.

But come on, it's not that bad, this article is hyperbolic.

RMacy• 14 years ago

Totally concur. It's gotten to the point where there isn't an obvious amount of features/changes to be done.

markmm2• 14 years ago

has the width changed? or just the height? If it's just eh height most apps will work as the view will just stretch.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Nope. Same width, same PPI. A lot of apps (particularly scrolling list/view apps) will need barely anything changing.

bornhuetter3• 14 years ago

The whole idea of there being one single perfect phone size is nonsense. I'm 6'3", with large hands, so I can quite comfortably use a 4.5"+ screen. My Asian wife has much smaller hands, so would struggle with anything bigger than 4"-4.5" (that's what she said).

Different people are going to prefer different phone sizes.

markmm2• 14 years ago

Lucky she's married to you then eh?

Sorry couldn't resist

huxley3• 14 years ago

I know there are pressures to get an article --any article-- out there, but the linkbaiting and trolling (on both pro- and con) is going off-the-charts with the iPhone 5.

I really should have stuck to my guns and ignored all the articles until 2 or 3 weeks pass by and we're dealing more with hard facts, less with tea-leaves and parsing every sentence that Apple staff said (or failed to say).

mbell• 14 years ago

"...under delivers on the hardware specification"

What was under delivered on? Are people really this upset about NFC?

jdechko• 14 years ago

Agreed. People keep comparing the device to the Nokia 920, but nobody has had some good hands-on time with either device. NFC might be a nice feature to have, but there's very little infrastructure in place to support it. Wireless charging is cool, but I'm not sure it's much more than a gimmick at this point? What's a use case for wireless charging where it's more practical than plugging in? On paper the 920 has the "better" camera than the iPhone 5, but the sample photos from the 920 were faked. Even if the iPhone 5 isn't quite as good, it's still going to be a top 5 camera.

Fortunately, we live in a time where smartphones are developing at a very rapid pace. And we as consumers have some really great options. You might have to make some compromises, but not many.

bane4• 14 years ago

I agree, the hardware specs are fine. Nothing to get excited about, but that's rarely been the thrust of iPhone's appeal anyway (outside of perhaps the retina display).

I think the phoned in industrial design is the problem. "Let's make it a bit taller and take the glass off the back" is simply not the improvement in industrial design from one generation to the next that might be expected:

bezel-less - http://static.droidblog.net/dgstorm/df/bezel-free-folded-sam...

flexible screens - http://homeklondike.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/1-concept...

pixel-qi style display

1ms touchscreen response

full color touch sensitive display projector - http://gadgetsin.com/uploads/2012/03/ufo_smartphone_concept_...

any one of these things (done in the typically well designed Apple way) would have been worth a full number update on the phone.

Here's an entire gallery of ideas https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+phone+design+concepts&...

but what was launched just feels like refinement and not imagination

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Yep. The iPhone 5 looks like an iPhone 4S, but longer. It should have been the iPhone 4SS, not the iPhone 5. It's not a big enough change.

huxley3• 14 years ago

On the topic of 1ms touchscreen response, I'd be interested in seeing how the pixel integrated touch electrodes affect response time.

adsr2• 14 years ago

I've got the impression that most of the phone internals has been updated. I prefer that to cosmetic design changes for it's own sake and gimmick features that isn't yet established and/or used by many. I like what Apple bring with it's media expertise and the added hardware image processing and panorama photo.

Bud• 14 years ago

A silly, trivial article with major errors or questionable fudges in basically every paragraph.

The writer says the phone can be summed up by an extra row of home icons; there are in fact improvements to many hardware and software facets of the device. One may not think the improvements are major, but denying their existence temporarily to make an argument is silliness.

He then gripes for two paragraphs about his own personal impressions about how Apple presents products, including one paragraph griping about a guy who is now dead, and thus presumably not responsible for the presentation in question, i.e., the iPhone 5 presentation.

In the next paragraph, more whining about presentation, plus a blatant lie, saying "Apple tried to convince us that it had stolen a 16:9 display from the gods". Apple did no such thing. I watched the entire 2-hour event. There is not a single boast about Apple magically creating 16:9, originating 16:9, or any other such nonsense. In fact, 16:9 was barely mentioned. At all. The writer is simply making it up.

Then griping about a Jony Ive video.

Then silliness about how "Thin and light smartphones were an exciting concept a couple of years ago"; perhaps the writer hasn't noticed, but thin and light has ALWAYS been a driving concept in smartphones and basically every other kind of portable (and even non-portable) tech design. It has always been an issue and will always be an issue. So when someone makes something circa 20% thinner and lighter, yes, that is noteworthy. It will not change the course of planetary history single-handedly, but it is notable.

He then lies about the hardware, saying that "you would be hard stretched to find any new features except for the single-chip GSM/CDMA/LTE radio". But that's not true either. The CPU is reported to use A15 cores, which would make Apple first to market, but all the writer can do about that is boast of some vaporware product using the A15. The writer ignores the camera upgrades, the speaker upgrade, addition of an extra mic, etc., etc.

Later in the article, he gets the software wrong too, talking about how iOS will use the additional screen space: "Rather than do something interesting with this space, though, Apple will simply letterbox all 3:2 apps". That's already untrue; Apple has already redesigned the OS and its own apps to do interesting things with that space, and third parties who make major apps will of course do full redesigns in most cases too.

The author then makes a hilariously bad statement about why Apple made the phone thinner: "It seems like Apple felt compelled to increase the iPhone’s screen size, but at the same time it couldn’t summon up the marketing cojones to introduce a phone that was both larger and heavier than the iPhone 4S."

Yeah, that's right. The author is actually saying that the phone is lighter and thinner because of Apple's lack of "marketing cojones".

It's just hilariously bad writing and control of the facts, all the way through.

stanleydrew2• 14 years ago

It's an opinion piece. I don't think there's any reason to get too upset. We may not agree with it, but I wouldn't say it's bad writing just because I don't agree.

People are allowed to gripe. Some people don't think this iPhone is a significant improvement over the last. That's fine. You probably can't convince those people otherwise.

mikeash2• 14 years ago

The author is allowed to have his own opinions, but not his own facts. The post you're replying to seems to be complaining about incorrect facts, not just different opinions.

leephillips• 14 years ago

Plus he doesn't know what "ameliorate" means.

cs702• 14 years ago

The entire iOS app ecosystem has been built upon the idea of 'pixel perfection,' and now this historical focus on perfection has ironically put many, and perhaps most, iOS developers in the position of having to modify their apps to support a growing variety of specific-to-the-pixel screen resolutions.

In the interim, users have to put up with ugly artifacts like black bars and up-sampled graphics.

PS. The Android team's decision to provide from early on a resolution-independent GUI framework that automatically uses all screen real estate, regardless of resolution or aspect ratio, is looking smarter by the day.

emp• 14 years ago

I think "pixel perfect" refers to matching a designer's visual design. iOS developers should have been using the layout constraints for most of the UI - if they have hardcoded values, then that is bad programming.

For apps that use a lot of UI graphics in the form of images, yes they have work to do. But the same would be true on Android.

adsr2• 14 years ago

How is that working exactly? If you are using custom graphics it needs to be stretched to fit a larger screen, or letter boxed to keep it's original ratio. If you are using nothing by standard UI elements it will adapt to the screen.

baconner• 14 years ago

First there's a good set of flexible layout controls to build ui that'll position / size elements to the available screen real estate. So you can build screens that position elements fairly well on different resolutions.

Second you can make multiple versions of these layouts that'll swap in given some device parameters. So if the flexible layouts didn't suit your need you could make (for example) one for tablets, one for phones. You can do the same for bitmaps so you can have different versions of each for different DPIs.

For bitmap aspect ratio issues there are also 9patch bitmaps which specify which portions of the image can be stretched and which can't. That works pretty well for small adjustments and background images.

simonh• 14 years ago

For Android it wasn't smarter, because they allowed any screen size and dimensions it was absolute necessity.

Which is why Apple introduced Auto layout in the iOS 6 SDK.

I don't really see this as a problem. Old apps still work just as will as they always did, and now you can also support a single larger screen size. If they wre goign to proliferate further. 3, 4 or more screen dimensions (in pixels) yes I'd say that's a problem, but two, especialy since one dimension is still exactly the same?. No, not a problem.

What I do wonder is how apps that support the larger screen size work on an iPad. Presumably they only run in small/older screen mode, scaled?

schiffern• 14 years ago

>For me, the biggest issue with the new 16:9 screen is that the entire iOS app ecosystem has been built upon the idea of 'pixel perfection,' and this historical focus on pixel-perfect design has now put iOS developers in the position of having to modify their apps to support a growing variety of specific screen resolutions.

All iPhone apps already have to resize vertically. The status bar changes height when you're in a call.

dmishe• 14 years ago

It is still pixel perfect. Graphics is not up-sampled because it is still the same Retina tech, and black bars are mere inconvenience, I don't think it will be anywhere near as bad as indeed old 1x graphics in 3gs->4 transition.

As for android team, Google's YouTube app on Google's Nexus 7 device with Google's Android OS, when launched in portrait, goes to landscape _automatically_ and takes button controls like back button from the bottom of the screen to the side. I truly believe that technology is there, but apparently nobody gives a flying fuck about it.

andrethegiant• 14 years ago

"Rather than do something interesting with this space, though, Apple will simply letterbox all 3:2 apps — all 700,000 of them in the App Store. If you can believe it, you will actually get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen."

Please. What else would you do besides letterboxing? Stretch the content in the y direction? That would look terrible. Implement some cool new feature that lives inside the new screen real estate? Then devs wouldn't want to upgrade their apps to support the iPhone 5 ratio. Letterboxing is for backwards-compatibility, but the author makes it sound like Apple can't think of anything creative to fill that space. And because the screen dimension change is only in one direction, developers will have an easier time modifying their app layouts.

Someone• 14 years ago

"What else would you do besides letterboxing?"

Show ads :-)

The only slightly useful thing I can think of is that they could permanently show the app switcher, but I am not even sure that is a good idea. It probably would make it too easy to jump out of an app.

IPhone 5: Apple’s 16:9 compromise

Related Stories