No Widescreen
So, why isn’t the iPad a widescreen device?
It’s because it’d completely screw up the UI for applications. The idiom of the iPad applications is to have a list and content column in landscape mode, and just a content column in portrait mode. How does that look?
With a 4:3 aspect ratio, the content column can always be the same size, and, at three times the width of the summary column, there’s a clear priority order established. Also, the content column is a square in landscape mode here—it’s never wider than it is tall.
At 16:9, the summary column is almost the same width as the content column (7 units vs 9), so there’s no clear priority. If you make the summary column narrower, the content column has to go from wider than it is tall to taller than it is wide, which biases the device towards making the portrait layout the content-consumption one.
