I was trying to figure out why do manufacturers choose pentile screens. I think I have nailed the truth.



As you see, the latest Samsung phones have slightly smaller subpixels but still the subpixel size is the limiting factor. So where manufacturers need to pack more pixels in the same real estate, they choose pentile, which in reality is a trick for higher perceived resolution with the exact same number of subpixels.

The subpixel diagonal is not real, it is just assuming that the subpixels are square, but I calclulated so that we have a human-readable measure of comparison.

updated in the first post too for posterity