If you’ve been wondering what it would look like if the display screens of every iPhone ever purchased were somehow stitched together to create a massive, hulking monoscreen, today happens to be your lucky day. Josh Orter, the mathematical mastermind behind the new website Stupid Calculations, has taken the time (and no small amount of mental stamina) to solve this mystery just for our curious minds.
Using some basic math and a little digging into Apple’s iPhone sales data, Orter has calculated just how big this monolithic screen would be. At 5,059 feet tall and 2,846 feet wide, big is sort of an understatement. To put it in perspective: The screen would be a bit wider than Central Park and a couple hundred feet shy of a mile tall, making it nearly triple the height of new One World Trade Center building. Plant that thing in the middle of Manhattan, as the rendering above shows, and all of New York City has a front-row seat to your next Snapchat.
Orter breaks down the math on his site, but here’s the quick and dirty version: First he figured out how many iPhones have been purchased since its 2007 release until the current quarter (answer: approximately 352,292,000). Next he set about figuring out the collective surface area using the phone’s dimensions—a trickier task considering the move from a 3.5” diagonal screen to the iPhone 5’s 4″. From there the math gets a little more hairy, but suffice it to say the surface area is the equivalent of nearly 250 pro football fields (or 14.39 million sq. feet, 330.54 acres or 2.07 billion sq. inches for those of you with a rusty mental calculator).