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Many Looking Past iPhone 7 to Next Year's iPhone 8 (fortune.com)
Reuters reports: The iPhone 7 is expected to make its global debut on Wednesday, but many consumers and investors are already setting their sights on Apple's 2017 version of the popular gadget, hoping for more significant advances. At its annual product launch in San Francisco on Wednesday, the world's most valuable publicly traded company is expected to reveal an iPhone without a headphone jack, paving the way for wireless headphones, a touch-sensitive home button that vibrates, double-lens cameras for the larger Plus edition and other incremental improvements. Apple typically gives its main product, which accounts for more than half of its revenue, a big makeover every other year and the last major redesign was the iPhone 6, in 2014. The modest updates suggest that this cycle will be three years.Apple will celebrate iPhone's 10th anniversary next year. Rumor has it that the company plans to switch from LCD to OLED for display on the next year's flagship phone. It is also pegged to have an all-glass body.
a touch-sensitive home button that vibrates, double-lens cameras for the larger Plus edition
Sigh.... Vibrating button is a parlor trick, nothing useful or appealing...... Go do something useful, like 200GB of memory in the base
model, and provide me a memory card slot, so I can load in data from external devices, archive things, or have additional storage available on
my phone.
Also, longer battery runtime and an option to replace my battery on the go are necessary,
until you do those things, Apple: I have no reason to upgrade.
They probably mean "Paving the way for wireless headphones that are ginormous piles of crap".
Honestly, Stereo bluetooth sounds like crap. It's adequate if you're listening to music in a noisy environment so you would be able to identify details anyway, or if you just don't care... The compression used in Bluetooth is so severe that it not only ruins music, but even makes the majority of VOIP codec's unusable. I tried setting up a VOIP system on a tablet, and the only way I could make it work was to use a codec that did minimal compression (and so was very bandwidth intensive). Anything else made it sound like a Cylon being pushed feet-first into a Blendtec Blender.
There are some devices out there that use aptX for higher fidelity audio, but that's a proprietary codec that has very tiny market penetration.
The next major version of Bluetooth, which should be available "soon", is supposed to have a new profile specifically for high quality audio, and I'm setting my hopes on that.
Also, it's not unusual for Apple to get certain technology before anyone else (ie: thunderbolt), so I'm hoping that they are doing what they are doing with the iPhone 7 because they have got some kind of exclusivity agreement with someone for their silicon, and so the audio should sound amazing. If they don't... well... I expect Apple's phone division will probably have a bad time this year.