Shhh, Apple doesn’t want you to know! Call it an Easter Egg, or hidden feature, inside your shiny new Apple smartphone. Yes, boys and girls, the powerful 64-bit A8 chip that comes with every iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus can playback 4K video.
Although the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus offer native resolutions of “only” 1334 x 750 and 1920 x 1080 pixels, respectively, these devices can nevertheless playback 4K video. How do we know?
The good people at Softorino, creators of the WALTR Mac to iPhone video transfer app (download), discovered this cool little tidbit while testing their code:
The magic behind the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus’ ability to playback 4K video is Apple’s custom designed A8 processor, which often run at half the speed of competing silicon. Apple’s chip design continues to shame the industry with superior performance and power management at lower clock speeds
And because it’s designed to be so power efficient, the A8 chip can sustain higher performance, so you can play graphics-intensive games or enjoy video at higher frame rates for longer than ever — Apple
While many Android smartphones have triple and quad core processors, most can’t effectively playback 4K video.
Of course, the new iPhones can capture 4K video — these days it’s a checklist feature. However, most smartphone feature checklists don’t include 4K playback and the reasons are simple: 1.) relatively low native display resolutions and, perhaps the most important limiting factor, 2.) 4K video files are huge.
So, why would anyone want to play 4K video on their iPhone or any other smartphone when they can’t see all of the pixels anyway? So, Apple didn’t want us to know that the new iPhones have 4K playback and we can certainly understand why…
What’s your take?
Via: MacRumors