What If Old Gadgets Had the Same Screen As the Next iPad?

On Wednesday, Apple is almost certainly going to announce an iPad with a pixel-jammed 2048 x 1536 display.

Like the iPhone 4s, the next iPad is going to have a screen so sharp that it doesn’t seem like it’s made up of discrete dots. But of course it is. They’re just densely packed: 3,145,728 of them clustered together at 264 pixels-per-inch, to be exact.

Which got me thinking: How big would the new iPad be, physically, if it were using the same screen technology as the gadgets people already own, like a laptop or a TV?

So I ran the numbers. The current iPad, for example, has a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 screen, which works out to a pixel density of about 131 PPI. In order to match the new iPad’s total number of pixels, the iPad 2 would need a 19-inch screen at its current pixel density. In other words: it would be huge.

Here are a few more, just for fun:

Special thanks to BuzzFeed visual designer Amy Sly. Image by John Herrman