I read a lot of websites that follow Apple. There are alway rumors about future products on these sites. May of these rumors are just noise in that they are not backed up by anything substantial.
One site that isn’t a bunch of Apple rumor noise is Daring Fireball by John Gruber. This is were I get most of my links to Apple related news.
Today’s post about Apple’s rumored 4 inch iPhone exemplifies why Gruber is well respected amongst Mac nerds. Here’s Gruber, from today’s post, crunching the numbers on why a 4 inch iPhone display is probably accurate:
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.
This passes the “makes sense” test.