“As we face up to the culmination of another year of hyped-up iPhone speculation, I do see three particular ways in which the iPhone 8 (or whatever Apple calls its new flagship) will indeed be the harbinger of massive and irrevocable change,” Vlad Savov writes for The Verge.
“Phone Screens. The new iPhone will be the biggest reconfiguration of the front of Apple’s smartphone since its inception a decade ago. The mechanical home button was ditched last year in favor of a fixed pad with haptic feedback, and this year Apple is removing the whole thing,” Savov writes. “The iconic outline of an iPhone, featuring two big bars of bezel at top and bottom and a round home button, is going to be no more. We’re all underestimating just how massive a change this will be, and how strong the reaction to it will be. Those of us in the know have grown blasé about bezel-less screens, while most people just aren’t yet aware of what’s coming from Apple. Whether Samsung likes it or not, September 12th will be the date when the majority of people first learn about bezel-less screens… It won’t take months or weeks for everyone to start demanding bezel-free phones, it’ll be instant.”
“Flagship Prices. By most predictions, the new flagship iPhone will be priced somewhere in the vicinity of $1,000, probably starting just below that mark and topping out somewhere above it, subject to spec. This is going to be the biggest upward push that Apple has made with the price of its top iPhone model, though indications are that demand will still likely outstrip supply,” Savov writes. “Augmented Reality. With the instant user base that the iPhone promises to ARKit developers, it’s easy to foresee AR taking off with the launch of the iPhone 8 and iOS 11… The ARKit toolset for creating AR experiences that Apple unveiled as part of its new iOS 11 is a massive upgrade over anything else that’s come before it. That operating system will come preloaded on the iPhone 8 and will be distributed to the majority of iPhones already in use, making for an immediate user base of hundreds of millions of people.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The only reason why Apple waited until now (next week) to move to OLED displays is because nobody could possibly make enough of them (and it’s still going to be the case, that’s why Apple is starting with their high-end flagship in order to try to manage a supply-demand situation that’s about to rapidly get out of control). It was a supply chain capacity issue. Regarding a $1,000+ iPhone, we paid $969 for each of our 256GB Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus units, so what some perceive as “high” prices for a smartphone are nothing new. As for Apple’s AR efforts:
Augmented Reality is going to change everything. — MacDailyNews, July 21, 2017
Someday, hopefully sooner than later, we’ll look back at holding up slabs of metal and glass to access AR as unbelievably quaint. — MacDailyNews, July 28, 2017
The impact of augmented reality cannot be overstated. It will be a paradigm shift larger than the iPhone and the half-assed clones it begat. — MacDailyNews, August 4, 2017