Every iPhone Screen Ever Sold Looks Like This
by Brent Dirks
May 31, 2013
Wow, maybe I should have paid attention in math class. The team at Stupid Calculations had some fun with this scenario: What would it look like if the screen from every iPhone ever sold was ripped out to make a monster screen?
As you can see, the hypothetical screen is pretty damn amazing when placed in the New York City skyline:
The eye-glazing calculations are laid out below for those who appreciate the dirty work but, skipping ahead, the Kubrick-inspired monophone would stretch 5,059 feet into the sky and have a base measuring 2,846 feet across (Central Park is 2,640 feet wide). Its surface area would take in 2.07 billion square inches. That’s 14.39 million square feet or 330.54 acres. The new World Trade Center, by comparison, will have a surface area of 23 glass-clad acres, giving us enough screenage to watch Game of Thrones on all four sides of fourteen WTCs.Since its introduction in 2007, and spanning all the way to the most recent quarter, Apple has sold 352,292,000 iPhones. The new, 4-inch screen of the iPhone 5 made calculations interesting, but the mathletes at the site did a nice job coming up with the bottom line:
Central Park’s almost exactly half a mile across, making the screen just a touch wider. So lay the base of a 16:9 rectangle at the south end of Central Park South and proportionally scale it 7.23% wider than the park’s borders. Then double-check by using the 705-foot height of the General Motors building at the southeast corner of the park: monophone needs to be 7.15 times taller. By happy coincidence, Apple’s 5th Avenue glass cube store is bunkered under the GM Building’s plaza.
