Tim Cook pours cold water on iPhone 5 with 4-inch screen - ZDNet (blog)

Summary: Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook appears to have poured cold water over suggestions the next iPhone will have a larger screen. Strangely, he outright said it. On air. Live.

Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook has ruled out a 4-inch screen on the next-generation iPhone.

He reportedly said, according to The Verge who transcribed the entire conversation, speaking at the D:10 conference (emphasis mine):

“One thing is that we’re not fragmented. Look at the percentage of users who upgraded to iOS 5. We have one App Store. We have one phone with one screen size, one resolution. So it’s pretty simple if you’re a developer.”

And that was it.

It’s the one thing we can be pretty certain about with the upcoming iPhone. Considering everything else he said was laced with subjectivity, it certainly came as surprise to me, only minutes after he said Apple would “double down on secrecy”.

Interestingly, Cook’s comments seem to have gone against even seemingly reliable sources, such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, who both said the iPhone 5 would get a 4-inch screen “or more”.

But this one has quietly irked me for a while.

All iterations of the iPhone has had the same screen size. They’ve had proportional screen resolutions so applications can scale up and down as per the Retina display in the iPhone 4 and 4S, but ultimately it looks the same. You don’t have overhangs and naff looking applications that vary in size and shape across older versions of devices.

It’s a one-size-fits-all policy. To use an Apple-ism: “it just works.” There’s no reason, however, why Apple can’t roll out a “Retina-display killer” screen of the same dimensions and aspect ratio, as ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes explains.

“Small tweaks to the screen resolution or aspect ratio could break the way current apps are displayed, requiring developers to rewrite their apps to support the new screen.”

I think one of the things people need out of the iPhone going forward â€" and the iPad for business productivity â€" is consistency. The design can change, the features can be added to and taken away, but screen-size is the killer focus of the device.

Application developers need to be able to keep writing for the same platform year after year, iteration after iteration, without having to return to the drawing board because a company wants to give developers more space to do stuff with.

Image credit: Sarah Tew/CNET.

Related:

• iPhone 5 could feature a “Retina display killer” screen
• Reuters: iPhone 5 to have 4-inch screen
• WSJ: iPhone 5 getting 4-inch+ screen
• Who cares that the iPad 3 is thicker and heavier than the iPad 2?
• iPhone touch panel shipments to fall 15-20 percent in Q2 2012

Zack Whittaker, a criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

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Disclosure

Zack Whittaker

I worked briefly with Microsoft UK in 2006 but no longer have any connection with the company. Regardless, I remain impartial and unbiased in my views.

I don't hold any stock or shares, investments or industrial secrets in any company, but have signed confidentiality agreements with a number of UK and U.S. organisations, whose names I am not at liberty to disclose.

I was involved with Kent Union, the University of Kent's student union, undertaking voluntary, non-salaried, elected positions between early 2009 and mid-2010.

No other company, body, government department, non-governmental organisation or third sector organisation employs me or pays me a salary in any capacity whatsoever.

As a freelance journalist, whenever expenses are given and taken by a company that is not CBS Interactive, these will be disclosed in each relevant post to ensure transparency.

I currently work with a UK law enforcement unit, but this is an entirely separate position which bears no connection to other work.

(Updated: 23rd October 2011)

Biography

Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker, criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, UK, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

After studying criminology at university, though still in his early-20's, he has already had a series unconventional work and voluntary positions. He has worked with researchers studying neurological illnesses like Tourette's syndrome (which he suffers from), has given lectures on the nature of disabilities in the public community, and occasionally ends up speaking on television and radio discussing the events of the day.

He first had academic work published at the age of 22, then still an undergraduate, and has been cited by a wide range of publications: from CNN, the Huffington Post, AllThingsDigital, The Atlantic Wire and CBS News.