Two years ago, in June of 2010, Steve Jobs stood on stage at WWDC and announced the iPhone 4. With it came Apple’s stunning new retina display, a technology that would eventually make its way to the iPad and almost exactly two year’s later, the MacBook Pro.
Alongside the iPhone 4 Apple also released iOS 4. Thanks to the iPhone 4’s retina display, iOS 4 got a substantial makeover. Apple upgraded all their stock iOS apps, along with every font and graphic in the system, in order to prevent them from looking pixelated on the new display. App makers were soon forced to follow suit, lest their apps suffer by comparison.
There was one graphic, however, that missed out on iOS 4’s retina display makeover. It’s the shutdown spinner, that little spinning graphic that shows up on your phone’s screen for a few seconds after you tell it to shut down, but before it actually switches off. While every other graphic or animation in iOS 4 got a crisp, clean, retina upgrade, the shutdown spinner stayed the same. Chances are you’ve never noticed it. Chances are that even if you have noticed, it didn’t really bother you that much.
On the other hand, you could be like me: once you noticed that the spinner was still pixelated, it bothered you every time you shut your phone down. After all, it can’t be that hard to just fix the spinner? Why hasn’t Apple fixed the spinner? They’ve released a dozen minor iOS updates since iOS 4 and they still haven’t fixed the damn spinner!
Well, if you’re one of those people, then you’re in luck. According to The Next Web iOS 6 finally, at long last, fixes the damn spinner. They discovered the updated spinner graphic when fiddling around with the newly-released iOS 6 beta and attempted to get a picture of it. That attempt resulted in an image that was… less than optimal. Fortunately, a reader who also had access to the iOS 6 beta decided to be merciful and send in a decent quality image. Check it out below:
There, now. Isn’t that better?