Here’s the iPad as you (probably) haven’t seen it before:
Like many others, at one point I found myself asking, “Wait… it’s a 4:3 screen?” It wasn’t because I was disappointed in the new specs; this was hours after I had seen actual images of the device. “I could have sworn it was widescreen!”
I wasn’t quite ready to dismiss my initial perception of the device. After all, the media-consuming public has been conditioned over the past decade to accept that widescreen is just better. Our TVs are wider. Our monitors are wider. Even our Apple laptops are wider.
But the iPad, as it turns out, isn’t wider. That doesn’t stop Apple from giving the impression of width on their website (or, at the very least cleverly transitioning us towards this “new” aspect ratio). My initial perception was wrong, but it took an image rotation in Photoshop to really convince my brain.
Looking at the promo images of the product, it’s not hard to see why. The iPad is almost always presented vertically. If not, it’s slanted away from the camera and pointing off-page, giving an illusion of width-through-depth that, if you don’t look carefully, makes it look wider than it actually is.
Apple isn’t evil and this isn’t a malicious “gotcha” scheme, of course, but it’s worth noting. The folks at Apple are masters at presentation, and I’m positive that they put as much thought into this as any other part of their launch campaign. As far as gripes go, the 4:3 aspect ratio usually comes in pretty low on lists, and I’m betting it’s due in part to this clever presentation.
It reminds me of the old tables optical illusion: Which tabletop is longer?
The answer (like most optical illusions) is that they’re both the same. Exactly the same shape for both tabletops. That one on the left sure looks longer though, doesn’t it?