Apple is doubling down on its trend toward bigger iPhone screens, and bigger screens in general for that matter. Along with a huge new iPad Pro, Apple on Wednesday announced that its upgraded iPhone 6 models—the 6 S and the 6 S Plus—will have the same-sized screens as their counterparts announced last year.
And though iPhone purists may still bemoan the trend toward larger screens, Apple already knows these things will sell. “iPhone 6 is the most popular iPhone ever,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said onstage Wednesday. “These are the most popular phones in the world.”
Bigger screens are more than a business move, though. They also tell us what a phone actually is in 2015. To Apple, a phone is a pocketbook-held proxy for the watch it hopes you're glancing at on your wrist. Which is a cynical way of saying: Maybe if Apple makes a phone bulky enough, consumers will warm up to its sleeker, wearable counterpart. But it’s more than that.
An iPhone is for recording video, and publishing photos, and texting, and writing grocery lists, and watching Netflix, and reading the news, and scrolling through status updates, and and and... A bigger screen is, let's face it, helpful for all of those functions.
Maybe now is the time to point out that the iPhone’s dramatic shape shifting in the past year is all relative, anyway. Even the biggest iPhone seems sleek compared with Apple's new iPad Pro, which has a whopping 12.9-inch screen.