Rethinking Display Size (Premium)

It hasn’t taken me very long to identify a few key areas of concern with the iPhone 12, but to be clear these issues are personal, meaning they relate to my ability to use this handset full-time going forward. So they may or may not bother you at all.

One such issue is the size of the display. And while display size sounds like a simple enough topic---it’s whatever size in inches, measured on the diagonal---it’s gotten complex in recent years thanks to the evolving nature of the smartphone.

Today, smartphone displays aren’t just “bigger” than they used to be---again, as measured in inches diagonally---they’re also taller, top to bottom, and they are different widths, side-to-side, leading in sum to different aspect ratios. Taller and wider displays let you see more content, or at least provide a bigger canvas for that content, but they can also lead to heavier handsets that are hard or impossible to hold and use with a single hand.

To combat that reality, some handset makers have used very tall aspect ratio displays which are taller but less wide. This is, I think, a good compromise: Such handsets are often easier to hold and use with one hand, though icons and other content located towards the top of the screen will require two hands to reach.

I’ve been thinking a lot about display size this year. There’s been an interesting revival in small display devices like the Apple iPhone SE and Google Pixel 4a, but we’ve also seen larger devices get even bigger, as with the Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.

One’s preferences are one’s own, of course. But whereas I’ve always appreciated and wanted the largest displays possible, that’s changed over the past year. In late 2019, I bought an iPhone 11 Pro Max, and while I’m mostly OK with the size of this display---6.5-inches on the diagonal---I’m not at all happy with its brick-like weight and thickness. It’s ... just too much. The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra I reviewed recently, however, crossed a line. Yes, it’s an amazing handset, but it’s a 6.7-inch display and the resulting heft and size required of its form factor---not to mention its curved edges, which lead to far too many mis-taps---made me wonder if smartphone makers had reached some ceiling.

Like the Note 20 Ultra, the Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 6.7-inch display, and my experience with the Samsung and the Pro Max’s huge and dense predecessor both played roles in me looking elsewhere for this generation of iPhones.

But the iPhone 12 feels ... small to me. Is, perhaps, on the border of being too small. (Again, for me. I realize some prefer smaller displays. God love you, there’s no need to argue the point.) And I was curious why that was: At 6.1-inches on the diagonal, the iPhone 12 display seems like a good half-way point between the humongous phablets and smaller handsets like the Pixel 4a (5.8-inches).

To understand how this display compares to other smartpho...