When Apple announced the iPhone 4 with 960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi or called it Retina Display, we didn’t really get it how much exactly that would be apart from the assumption that its got to be good. But when we saw these snaps posted on 9to5Mac, we really got blown away. What do you see in those pics ?? Robert Scoble took a snap of the iPhone 4 screen on June 7th, the day it was announced, with a professional DSLR and put it on Flickr today, and 9to5Mac posted it along with a new vs old shot. Even at that magnification the pixels look absolutely microscopic, and as they put it, you can try counting how many pixels fit across one line of a fingerprint. Then you look at the old iPhone next to it and like 9to5Mac says, what a difference some extra pixels make.
Now the numbers make sense. The 3GS packs 480 by 320 at 163 ppi, so the iPhone 4 has four times the pixels on the same 3.5 inch screen. Jobs said at around 300 ppi the eye cant make out individual pixels anymore, and he claims text will look like it does on a fine printed page. If you were wondering whether Retina Display was just another Apple marketing name, these snaps pretty much settle it. The phone ships June 24th, so expect more of these close ups soon. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: 9to5mac.com, flickr.com, apple.com, macworld.com.
