It’s actually a marginally smaller screen area on the 5.8” X/s than on the 5.5” plus phones taking everything into account - if you’re looking for the 16:9 equivalent on the XS it’s approximately 5”. Explained quite well here: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_x-review-1681p3.php
What really matters here though is the Max, XR and all the plus iPhones display 414 points horizontally, either @2x (XR) @3x interpolated to a 1080p panel (plus phones) or @3x (Max). The X/S display 375 points, the same as the non plus 6,6s, 7 and 8 (albeit sharper because it’s rendering @3x rather than @2x). Effectively you can think of ‘points’ as like the ‘looks like’ resolution on retina MacBooks, it determines how much content is displayed.
Imo, though I’ve always had plus phones, I think I would be happy with a 5” (effective) display - my primary reason for going plus size was for battery life and the better quality (pixel density) of the display. I’m not upgrading yet though because I want to wait and see if the loss of 3D Touch next year is so they can put Touch ID back in under the display. I can’t really see too many other reasons they’d be removing it...
... apart from profit gouging.
What really matters here though is the Max, XR and all the plus iPhones display 414 points horizontally, either @2x (XR) @3x interpolated to a 1080p panel (plus phones) or @3x (Max). The X/S display 375 points, the same as the non plus 6,6s, 7 and 8 (albeit sharper because it’s rendering @3x rather than @2x). Effectively you can think of ‘points’ as like the ‘looks like’ resolution on retina MacBooks, it determines how much content is displayed.
Imo, though I’ve always had plus phones, I think I would be happy with a 5” (effective) display - my primary reason for going plus size was for battery life and the better quality (pixel density) of the display. I’m not upgrading yet though because I want to wait and see if the loss of 3D Touch next year is so they can put Touch ID back in under the display. I can’t really see too many other reasons they’d be removing it...
... apart from profit gouging.