New iPhone X Spyshot Reveals a (Temporary) Problem

Apple’s premium iPhone X is just a few weeks away from being made available for pre-order, and while initial supply is expected to be limited through the end of the year, Cupertino has apparently given its employees the thumbs-up to start using their iPhone X devices in public.

In any event, we have an even newer photo of an iPhone X in the wild to share with you today, which was published last night to Reddit by user EddiOS42. See the image below.

If you take a real close look at it, you’ll notice what is unmistakably an iPhone X — upon which the user (who’s presumably an Apple employee) is playing Pokémon GO. Obviously the handset itself looks great, we have no complaints there. But if you center your focus specifically on its massive, 5.8-inch edge-to-edge Super Retina display, you might perhaps be taken aback by those pronounced, blacked-out portions of the screen.

But why are they even there? you might wonder. And the answer is because Apple changed the handset’s aspect ratio considerably, employing a taller, more narrow display than its ever used on an iPhone before.

In comparison to the 5.5-inch iPhone Plus models (which all feature the same 16:9 aspect and ~67.4% screen-to-body ratios), the iPhone X boasts a considerably more unconventional aspect ratio of 19.5:9 with a whopping ~82.9% of it being pure OLED.

The good news about Apple’s use of such a gorgeous and pixel-dense (albeit elongated) display is that iPhone X users will enjoy a plethora of immersive, full-screen content through their favorite apps. However, the bad news is that until app developers begin updating their titles to take full advantage of iPhone X’s new aspect ratio, essentially any program (except for Apple’s system apps like Message, Health, Notes, Settings, etc.) will be hindered by those giant black bars.

All we can really do is hope developers get to work on their updates sooner than later, and perhaps a good portion of titles will be fully-compatible with iPhone X by the time it launches. Either way: should you encounter these black bars when running apps on your own iPhone X, remember you’re just a simple app update away from a fix.