iPhone 12 pro - display problem

Chives · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:22

Evening all,

Posted this in the main threat, but suspect it'll get lost in there so posting here as would like some advice.

Picked up a 12 Pro today - lovely looking device and very snappy. I’ve been comparing it side by side to my 11 though and have noticed that the display density seems to be less, so throughout apps, web browsing and iOS itself there is less displayed on screen, which to me makes no sense given the higher resolution OLED!

I’ve had a glance at the settings and everything seems to be correct. Any ideas? It’s rather bizarre and seemingly nullifies one of the main advantages of this phone - my 11’s screen looks better when you put them side by side!

Any and all thoughts welcome

wedrum · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:24

Take it back

DaveClutton · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:25

Pretty sure I read somewhere that some apps will need updating for the new resolutions on the iPhone 12 & 12 pro.

bremen1874 · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:26

Not even a couple of screengrabs for comparison?

DaveClutton · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:26

https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-various-iphone-12-screen-sizes-e45c021e1b8b

Chives · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:38

bremen1874 said:
Not even a couple of screengrabs for comparison?

Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/fmxxpiu

Screenshots with red low battery are the 12 pro.

Chris1712 · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:40

Looks like you’ve got default font size set differently.

Chives · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:42

Just checked that again - they're both set to the same font size.

Mobius 1 · 24 Oct 2020 at 23:55

wedrum said:
Take it back

I agree. If I wasn’t totally happy I’d take it back and swap out for another one.

Alpherah · 25 Oct 2020 at 15:10

As someone above commented.
The 12 series is detected by websites as a smaller phone so it renders webpages differently to the 11 for some reason

Ev0 · 25 Oct 2020 at 15:54

Set the browser zoom level to something like 85% and see if that helps?

Did you have the browser zoom level set to anything else on the older phone?

Vertigo · 25 Oct 2020 at 15:57

Ev0 said:
Set the browser zoom level to something like 85% and see if that helps?

Did you have the browser zoom level set to anything else on the older phone?

Browser zoom isn't going to affect apps, such as the BBC News one he pictured.

Vertigo · 25 Oct 2020 at 16:12

DaveClutton said:
https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-various-iphone-12-screen-sizes-e45c021e1b8b

As this article explains quite well, the true resolution of the display isn't what iOS reports to apps. This started as soon as Retina displays appeared on the iPhone 4 - if the true display resolution was reported to a browser, for example, everything would be rendered far too small.

For this reason they tend to divide down the physical display resolution by some integral factor and that's what's reported to apps as the logical (what the article calls "native" confusingly) resolution of the display. In the case of the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro this factor is 3x, so the resolutions of each are reported as 375x812 and 390x844.

Of course apps need to be rebuilt with the latest version of XCode to see this new resolution of 390x844 on the 12/12Pro. Until they are, they'll see the old 375x812 of the 11.

What isn't clear is why things are rendering slightly larger on the 12, almost as if they're seeing a slightly lower resolution than the 11 Pro. They should really be showing exactly the same and, when recompiled with the latest XCode, render at the higher res and thus fit slightly more on screen.

Weird.

EDIT:

Ahhh hang on...

I thought it was being compared to an 11 Pro, didn't realise you were on about an 11.

The 11 has a display res of 828x1792 and uses a scaling factor of 2x to report a logical res of 414x896 to apps. As this is higher than the 390x844 of the 12 Pro (or the 375x812 it would use on old XCode for that matter), things are rendered slightly smaller as it sees it as a "larger" display.

Chives · 26 Oct 2020 at 19:18

Interesting, thank you for the detailed explanation. So I think the headline is then that there isn’t anything wrong with the phone per say, and the oddities I’m seeing will be patched out as apps / websites update their code?

Great phone in any case. It has got me thinking about a 12 Pro Max for the extra real estate...

Vertigo1 said:
As this article explains quite well, the true resolution of the display isn't what iOS reports to apps. This started as soon as Retina displays appeared on the iPhone 4 - if the true display resolution was reported to a browser, for example, everything would be rendered far too small.

For this reason they tend to divide down the physical display resolution by some integral factor and that's what's reported to apps as the logical (what the article calls "native" confusingly) resolution of the display. In the case of the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro this factor is 3x, so the resolutions of each are reported as 375x812 and 390x844.

Of course apps need to be rebuilt with the latest version of XCode to see this new resolution of 390x844 on the 12/12Pro. Until they are, they'll see the old 375x812 of the 11.

What isn't clear is why things are rendering slightly larger on the 12, almost as if they're seeing a slightly lower resolution than the 11 Pro. They should really be showing exactly the same and, when recompiled with the latest XCode, render at the higher res and thus fit slightly more on screen.

Weird.

EDIT:

Ahhh hang on...

I thought it was being compared to an 11 Pro, didn't realise you were on about an 11.

The 11 has a display res of 828x1792 and uses a scaling factor of 2x to report a logical res of 414x896 to apps. As this is higher than the 390x844 of the 12 Pro (or the 375x812 it would use on old XCode for that matter), things are rendered slightly smaller as it sees it as a "larger" display.

Vertigo · 27 Oct 2020 at 10:14

Things will get a little better/smaller when older apps are recompiled with new versions of XCode and recognise the true res of the 12 but they'll likely never look as small as on the 11 as that used a smaller 2x scaling factor, resulting in a higher logical res.

But yes, it's just down to scaling differences between different resolutions and an inherent feature of each phone rather than a bug of any kind.