When Apple unveiled its first Retina display with the iPhone 4 in 2010, it had an insane 326 pixels per inch, which Steve Jobs described as “comfortably over” the human retina limit of 300 ppi. With Vision Pro, Apple has blown the doors off of Retina to create a display that fits around 54 pixels into a single iPhone Pixel.
According to iFixit’s in-depth analysis, the Vision Pro has a pixel density of 3,386 ppi, which is “a seriously high-res display,” but not technically 4K, which clocks in at 3,840 pixels wide. However, iFixit says it’s “the highest-density display that we’ve ever seen,” besting the HTC Vive Pro (950 ppi) and Meta Quest 3 (1,218 ppi).
As iFixit and Steve Jobs explained, pixel density has as much to do with pixels per inch as it does the distance the screen is from your eyes. Because the screens are so close to your eyes, VR headsets measure displays in pixels per degree to generate “angular” resolution, which iFixit estimates at 34 ppd, about the same as a 65-inch television.
The rest of the teardown covers things like the battery, which uses three iPhone-battery-sized packs stacked atop each other connected in series, sensors, and chips, and determined that “there’s a lot to like here” when it comes to repairing and replacing broken parts. However, Vision Pro still gets a relatively low repairability score of 4 out of 10 due to its replaceable battery, and magnetic lenses and light seal.
iFixit believes there is much room for improvement: “Our hope is that, by the time these things get shrunken into a pair of eyeglasses, repairability won’t be something tacked on at the end, but a fundamental design tenet. If face goggles really are the future of computing, then we need to get this right from the very beginning.”
