iPhone 4
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iPhone 4
This changes everything. Again.
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| iPhone 4 — Technical Specifications (Apple Support) | |
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The iPhone 4 is a smartphone designed and marketed by Apple, and the fourth generation of the iPhone. Steve Jobs announced it at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 7, 2010, and it was released on June 24, 2010. It was the first full redesign of the product line, replacing three years of curved cases with a flat stainless-steel band sandwiched between two sheets of glass — a design so durable in the market's memory that Apple returned to its flat-sided language a decade later.
The iPhone 4 introduced an unusual number of firsts: the Retina display (a 960 × 640 panel whose 326 ppi made individual pixels effectively invisible), the Apple A4 — the first Apple-designed chip in an iPhone — a front-facing camera and FaceTime video calling, a gyroscope, and a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 720p video. It launched with iOS 4, the release that renamed iPhone OS and brought multitasking and home-screen folders.
It is equally remembered for its stumbles: a prototype left in a bar and published by Gizmodo months before announcement, and "antennagate," the signal-attenuation controversy that followed launch. Neither dented its commercial run — the iPhone 4 was Apple's most successful launch to date and remained on sale in some markets until 2013.
1 Design✎
The iPhone 4's industrial design, led by Jony Ive, abandoned the curved polycarbonate of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS eras. The frame is a band of machined stainless steel that doubles as the phone's antennas, capped front and back with flat panels of aluminosilicate glass. At 9.3 mm it was the world's thinnest smartphone at launch, weighing 137 grams. Jobs compared its precision to "a beautiful old Leica camera."
The glass back made the phone strikingly symmetrical but doubled the breakable surface area — cracked backs became a common repair. The design also debuted the micro-SIM in phones, shrinking the SIM tray to fit the dense interior.
The white model was announced alongside the black one but proved unexpectedly difficult to manufacture — Apple cited problems with paint thickness and light leakage into the camera — and did not ship until April 28, 2011, ten months late.
2 Retina display✎
The 3.5-inch IPS LCD quadrupled the pixel count of every previous iPhone: 960 × 640 at 326 pixels per inch. Apple branded it the "Retina display," arguing that at typical viewing distance the human eye cannot resolve individual pixels. Text rendering, in particular, jumped from noticeably pixelated to print-like, and the display — laminated closer to the cover glass, with IPS viewing angles and an 800:1 contrast ratio — was widely judged the best on any phone at launch. "Retina" became a permanent fixture of Apple's display branding across the product line.
3 Hardware✎
| Developer | Apple |
|---|---|
| Generation | 4th |
| Announced | June 7, 2010 |
| Released | June 24, 2010 (GSM) February 10, 2011 (CDMA/Verizon) April 28, 2011 (white) |
| Discontinued | September 10, 2013 |
| Predecessor | iPhone 3GS |
| Successor | iPhone 4s |
| Display | 3.5-inch Retina IPS LCD 960 × 640 (326 ppi) |
| Chip | Apple A4 (Cortex-A8, ~800 MHz) PowerVR SGX535 graphics |
| RAM | 512 MB |
| Storage | 16 GB · 32 GB (8 GB variant from 2011) |
| Rear camera | 5 MP backside-illuminated LED flash · 720p video at 30 fps |
| Front camera | VGA (FaceTime) |
| Battery | 1,420 mAh built-in |
| Connectivity | Quad-band UMTS/HSUPA (GSM model) or dual-band CDMA/EV-DO (Verizon) Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n · Bluetooth 2.1 Assisted GPS · 3-axis gyroscope |
| Colors | Black · White (from April 2011) |
| Launch price | $199 (16 GB) · $299 (32 GB) with 2-year contract (U.S.) |
| OS | iOS 4.0 ~ 7.1.2 |
The iPhone 4 was the first iPhone powered by an Apple-designed chip: the A4, pairing a Cortex-A8 core (clocked around 800 MHz in the phone) with PowerVR SGX535 graphics, alongside 512 MB of RAM — double the 3GS. The chip began Apple's silicon independence, a strategy that now spans the entire product line.
It was also the first iPhone with a three-axis gyroscope, which combined with the accelerometer and compass gave developers six-axis motion sensing — transformative for games. In February 2011 a CDMA model brought the iPhone to Verizon, ending AT&T's four-year United States exclusivity.
4 Cameras and FaceTime✎
The rear camera jumped to 5 megapixels with a backside-illuminated sensor — chosen for low-light performance over raw megapixels — plus, for the first time, an LED flash and 720p HD video recording at 30 frames per second. Apple's insistence on keeping the pixel size large rather than chasing megapixel counts became a durable theme of iPhone camera marketing.
The front-facing VGA camera enabled FaceTime, Apple's one-tap video calling between iPhones (Wi-Fi only at launch). FaceTime calls — demonstrated live on stage by Jobs and Ive — were the announcement's emotional centerpiece, and video calling became a standard smartphone expectation almost immediately.
5 Software✎
The iPhone 4 launched with iOS 4, the release that renamed the operating system from iPhone OS. iOS 4 introduced multitasking (via a fixed set of background service types), home-screen folders, unified email inboxes, and iBooks. Later updates delivered iOS 5 (2011) with iMessage, Notification Center, and iCloud, and iOS 6 (2012). The phone's final supported release was iOS 7.1.2 in 2014 — four full major versions on a 2010 hardware design, though iOS 7's animations ran visibly slower on it.
6 Antennagate✎
Within days of launch, users found that bridging the black gap in the steel band's lower-left corner with a bare hand could attenuate the signal — dropping bars and, in weak-coverage areas, calls. An emailed reply attributed to Jobs — "just avoid holding it in that way" — poured fuel on the story, and Consumer Reports declined to recommend the phone after reproducing the attenuation in lab tests.
On July 16, 2010, Apple held a rare press conference. Jobs presented data showing similar attenuation on competing phones and low return rates, but announced free bumper cases for all buyers and refunds for the unsatisfied. The free-case program ran through September 2010. The controversy faded quickly against sales momentum, and the CDMA revision quietly rearranged the antenna bands. "Antennagate" remains the reference point for every subsequent "-gate" naming of a phone controversy.
7 Release and reception✎
The iPhone 4's April 2010 pre-announcement leak — a prototype lost in a Redwood City bar and purchased and dissected by Gizmodo — was one of the biggest product leaks in consumer-electronics history, and made the WWDC unveiling a confirmation rather than a surprise. It did nothing to slow demand: 600,000 pre-orders in the first 24 hours crashed Apple's and AT&T's ordering systems, and 1.7 million units sold in the first three days made it Apple's most successful product launch to that point.
Reviews were emphatic that the Retina display, build quality, and camera set a new bar, with antennagate the recurring asterisk. The iPhone 4 remained in the lineup for over three years — as the mid-tier model after the iPhone 4s launched in October 2011, then as the free-on-contract entry model (with a new 8 GB variant) until September 10, 2013.
8 Legacy✎
The iPhone 4 is arguably the most influential single iPhone after the original. The Retina display forced the entire industry into a resolution race; the A4 began Apple's chip independence; FaceTime normalized video calling; and its flat glass-and-steel design remains the aesthetic Apple returned to from the iPhone 12 onward — visible in the current iPhone 17 generation. Even its failures were formative: antennagate reshaped how Apple communicates in a crisis, and the Gizmodo leak reshaped how it guards prototypes.