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The new iPhone 6 has been announced, and there are multiple posts about the number of pixels and the pixels per inch. That's great, but ignores an important question for developers that I don't seem to be finding anywhere.

What's the addressable screen size?

For example, the iPhone 5 has a 4" screen with 1136x640 pixels. Cool. But if I'm programming for it, the addressable screen size is 568x320. If I draw a line from 0,0 to 568,320 (in landscape mode, full seem, of course) it goes across the entire display, not half of it.

The iPhone 6 has two new pixel sizes, 1334x750 and 1920x1080 for the iPhone 6 Plus. Presumably, this means the addressable screen space for programming is 667x375 for the iPhone 6 and 960x540 for the iPhone 6 Plus. Can anyone confirm that?

Also, the simulator now has a variable size setting, but doesn't come preset for the new iPhones. Do you set the simulator to 1334x750 or 567x375 to set layouts for the iPhone 6?

Andy Dent
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Mike
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  • The iPhone 6 is 1334, not 1134 pixels tall. – rmaddy Sep 10 '14 at 15:52
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    BTW - Use the new iPhone 6 and 6+ simulators in the Xcode 6 GM to find all of this yourself. Of course you need to add the proper launch images to your app to properly support the new device sizes. – rmaddy Sep 10 '14 at 15:54

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The iPhone 6 has a scale of 2 so the point size is 375 x 667 (not 375 x 567).

The iPhone 6+ actually has a virtual pixel size of 1242 x 2208 with a scale of 3. So the point size is actually 414 x 736.

rmaddy
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  • So you have 1920x1080 actual pixels, and 2208x1242 virtual pixels? And the point size has nothing to do with the physical pixels? Odd. Any idea why this is useful from the programming perspective? – Mike Sep 10 '14 at 17:20
  • I thought 1920x1080 physical pixels with a point-factor of 3 would be 640x360 by simple division, like the 2x displays are. Is that not correct? – wjl Sep 10 '14 at 17:24
  • @Mike See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25755443/iphone-6-plus-resolution-confusion-xcode-or-apples-website for a good discussion. – rmaddy Sep 10 '14 at 17:27