Apple Lied About iPhone X Screen Size and Pixel Count, Lawsuit Alleges (cnet.com)

A lawsuit filed Friday is accusing Apple of falsely advertised the screen sizes and pixel counts of the displays in its iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max devices. The two plaintiffs, who filed the suit in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, are seeking class action status. CNET reports: The suit alleges that Apple lied about the screen sizes by counting non-screen areas like the notch and corners. So the new line of iPhones aren't "all screen" as marketed, according to the 55-page complaint. For example, iPhone X's screen size is supposed to be 5.8 inches, but the plaintiffs measured that it's "only about 5.6875 inches." The plaintiffs also allege that the iPhone X series phones have lower screen resolution than advertised. iPhone X is supposed to have a resolution of 2436x1125 pixels, but the product doesn't contain true pixels with red, green and blue subpixels in each pixel, according to the complaint. iPhone X allegedly only has two subpixels per pixel, which is less than advertised, the complaint said. The lawsuit also alleges iPhone 8 Plus has a higher-quality screen than iPhone X.

Comments

True pixels?

[scourfish]

I wasn't aware that for a pixel to be "true", it had to have a red,green,and blue subpixel. There are plenty of cell phones with LCD subpixel shapes that aren't "RGB" subpixels either. These can be for a myriad of design trade-offs, but at the high resolutions of those small displays, it's not really that noticeable. Older CRT televisions weren't "true" in their rbg pixel resolutions either.

Re:True pixels?

[Solandri]

To be fair, this was one of the criticisms Apple laid out against Samsung's original Galaxy S when it was released. That it used a pentile RGBG display instead of RGB like the iPhone, so it's 800x480 display resolution supposedly wasn't really an advantage over the iPhone 3G's 480x320 resolution. Evidently some iPhone owners still remember that, and Apple is now being hoisted by their own petard.

Your eyes are much better at resolving green than they are at red or especially blue. Nearly every method of storing video or photos has taken advantage of this - the old NTSC broadcast TV standard, color film composition, JPEG compression, digital camera sensors, even the latest h.265 video codec. All of them stored red and especially blue at a lower resolution than they do green. So you've been looking at the equivalent of pentile images all your life and never noticed it. Unless you peep at the pixels with a magnifying glass, there's no reduction in image quality from using a lower blue and red subpixel resolution than green. The only exception I've seen is due to a long-lived MPEG bug from the 1990s which still occasionally crops up as striations in blocks of solid color, especially red, which might not have been visible at a higher red resolution.

Unfortunately it was nearly impossible to convince iPhone owners and reviewers who'd drunk Apple's kool-aid of this fact, and Samsung eventually relented and used RGB versions of its OLED displays on their newer phones. So I'll shed no tears that Apple's chickens are now coming home to roost.

Re:True pixels?

[msauve]

"CRTs didn't have resolutions,"

Sure they did.

CRT resolution is related to bandwidth, focus, and physical size. NTSC monitors were lucky to achieve 160 horizontal lines of resolution (comparable to 320 pixels), and they were fixed at 525 lines vertically. RGB monitors could do better, and often allowed the timing to be changed to increase the vertical resolution.

Oh, and the guy in that video is using "resolution" wrong. When referring to CRTs, "resolution" was taken to mean lines of horizontal resolution. As used for LCD displays, it normally refers to display resolution, where it's an ambiguous misnomer, but most often meant to mean pixel dimensions (e.g. 1024x768). He's saying CRTs don't have pixels, despite the fact that pixels were used to describe CRT images long before LCDs were even thought of. For CRTs displaying bit-mapped images, the display resolution depends on both the capabilities of the display, and the device driving it. Hence, the old CGA/VGA/XGA, etc. nomenclature. Later CRT monitors could accept different timings and display resolutions.

Re: Hilarioud

[ShanghaiBill]

People use the advertised numbers to compare with other products before they buy. So they need to be correct.

No. They need to be wrong. Everybody else also counts a few pixels under the bezel, so for an Apples-to-apples (sorry) comparison, Apple should do the same. This is standard industry practice.

The pixel layout is different for OLED, where blue LEDs tend to be brighter but also have a shorter lifetime. So this is compensated in software by increasing the current to the blue LEDs as the screen ages. OLEDs use PenTile pixel layout.

With PenTile, instead of RGB-RGB-RGB- ... the pixels are RG-BG-RG-BG- .... The green pixels are narrower but twice as densely packed. This provides very good resolution, and continues to do so even as the screen ages. PenTile was pioneered by Samsung ... and Samsung makes the screen for the iPhone X.

Disclaimer: I am a happy owner of a four year old iPhone 6.

Unbelievable

[blahbooboo]

If you didnt like the screen then return the phone next time. What a waste of time and resources this is, its a pure cash grab by some attorneys.

Re: Hilarioud

[AmiMoJo]

The latest and greatest Samsung panels use a different pattern: https://fscl01.fonpit.de/userf...

It is standard for all OLED displays though, so yeah this lawsuit doesn't have much merit.

Re:Not Guilty

[Registered Coward v2]

Well, then Apple shouldn't be giving them an easy payday by being accurate about what they claim. It's really simple.

Nobody but the liars benefits when companies are allowed to fudge their numbers "because it's just a little bit", or "because we look at things differently".

Something the lawsuit seems to leave out is Apple's footnote on screen size:

The display has rounded corners that follow a beautiful curved design, and these corners are within a standard rectangle. When measured as a standard rectangular shape, the screen is 5.85 inches (iPhone XS), 6.46 inches (iPhone XS Max), 6.06 inches (iPhone XR), or 5.85 inches (iPhone X) diagonally. Actual viewable area is less. (As referenced in filing)

Which seems to explain how they determine screen size. That's pretty standard, going back to TV days which is why we have diagonal screen measurements. They also give the size in H and W in pixels, also a standard way of saying the size of the screen display unit. Apple seems to use industry standard ways to advertise their display, and even have a footnote explaining the rounded corner's impact and the actual viewing areas is less. It seems to me Apple disclosed the screen's viewing area isn't 6.5 inches and has

As for the "false pixels," that's the design. Different displays have different electrical designs. Each pixel has 2 sub pixels, but that doesn't change the number of pixels; even if some displays are capable of producing more colors per pixel.

There are legitimate reasons to sue companies such as Apple, but IMHO this isn't one of them. All this will result in is yet more footnotes explaining details that no one cares about or reads.

Disagree

[aepervius]

I have no idea for the actual merit in *this* case but there is a world of difference between "did not like it" and "false advertising". The first indeed merit a scorn, the second is usually very much frowned upon by consumer and by the court (frowned upon : as in usually lead to penalty). Personally I don't care anymore if this is an attorney cash grab, what I do care is that what is advertised is what is sold, within the law. if attorney can punish a lying firm , where I cannot, then much BETTER than doing nothing.

Re: Hilarioud

[mschwanke97402]

The latest and greatest Samsung panels use a different pattern: https://fscl01.fonpit.de/userf...

It is standard for all OLED displays though, so yeah this lawsuit doesn't have much merit.

The new XS Max uses the very same DiamondTile type OLED panel as it is a Samsung display: http://www.displaymate.com/Dia...