The original Macintosh, put together with spare parts from Steve Wozniak’s garage and held together with spit, utilized a display with a resolution smaller than a single iOS icon.
The original Macintosh had a 512 x 342 monochrome pixel display, and icons were a measly 16 x 16 pixels. Current iOS icons are 512 x 512 pixels packed with a 16.7 million color palette. The amount of memory required to display a single iOS icon is four times the total video memory of the original Mac.
Obviously iOS icons will never be shown at that resolution unless Apple falls of the deep end and starts implementing “Full Screen” icons as a new feature. Still, despite the massive difference in resources required the icons, the absolute size of the icons over the years has changed very little, onl the detail has.
Some day all that pixel density is going to be necessary, like when 4k retina displays are packed into 3.5” phones even though our eyes can’t tell the difference.
Source: Gizmodo
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