When working on a universal iOS app, I occasionally have the need to check what type of device the app is currently running on. This is pretty simple to do using the currentDevice static method of the UIDevice class. This gives you a UIDevice instance from which you can check the userInterfaceIdiom property. If you only need to check in one or two places this is sufficient:

But once you start repeating that code in more places, it feels like a lot of work to get right. So instead I created a simple macro named IsPhone to encapsulate the check:

Now I can just use the macro in my code instead of repeating the full check:

In general I try to avoid using this macro at all though. In most cases I have separate view controllers for the iPhone and iPad versions of a screen so this logic is unnecessary. Where I find it useful is in shared controllers (primarily settings-type screens that are shown as popovers on the iPad). This allows me to take different actions on popover dismissal as well as return different responses to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation depending on the current device.