First, at 1136 × 640, you get a diagonal of 1,303.877 pixels after applying the Pythagorean theorem. There are no such thing as fractional pixels, but what I’m talking about here are pixels as a unit of length, equal to 1/326 inch. Divide 1,303.877 by 326 and you get 3.9996 inches. Boom, a “4-inch” display. I’m sure if Apple instead went to 1152 pixels in height — which works out to 4.042 inches — they’d still just call it a “4-inch” display, for the sake of neatness, but it’s at least somewhat interesting that 1136 is the closest they could get to precisely 4.0 inches.
We did some math last night on the iPhone screen based on the 326ppi that Apple currently uses for Retina handheld devices. We did some rounding and got just over 3.95 inches diagonal. Rounding on numbers this important is a bad idea, so today we decided to let the calculator keep all of those decimals.
It really seems like this bigger iPhone story is picking up steam, and that’s fine, I suppose. I’m just at the point where I don’t give a shit about this kind of thing. Apple will release a new iPhone this summer or fall, it will be awesome, and I’ll purchase one. Even after it’s announced, I don’t think I’ll care about it being 3.99 or 4 inches across. Seriously, the numbers — and this story — aren’t important.