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.

Comments

Wireless Headphones

[Aerokii]

"Paving the way for wireless headphones"- really? We've had them for ages, they're not exactly new or even all that uncommon.

Re:Wireless Headphones

[grumpy-cowboy]

It's from Apple, so it's new again. ;)

Re:Wireless Headphones

[Kohath]

Just like there were MP3 players before the iPod.

Re:Wireless Headphones

[PhrostyMcByte]

Yes, but this time it's Apple doing it, so it's new and innovative. Like MP3 players and multi-touch were.

Re:Wireless Headphones

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re: Wireless Headphones

[ilsaloving]

Unless you can also tell me where on my mobile device I can explicitly set the bluetooth profile you specify, your comment is basically useless.

Most devices don't give you that level of control, or may well not provide that profile at all, so claiming that someone is "doing it wrong", whether developer or end user, is pointlessly hostile.

Many not satisfied with N say N+1 will be it.

[0100010001010011]

Apple, Ford, Android, Dell, Intel, et al.

Invariably you'll get the slashdotters whining that N+1 is only an incremental improvement over N without looking at the fact that some people are still on N-5. Skylake may not be the end all be all but if you're coming from Core or Nehalem it's a noticeable improvement.

New owners, you should know by now this isn't the stuff Slashdot is made of. At the minimum tack it on to the actual release story.

Re:Many not satisfied with N say N+1 will be it.

[0100010001010011]

Wow. Android Fanboy much? Apple puts considerable time into their software development and it comes across polished. While I'm fine installing Cyanogenmod to get rid of carrier shit most people aren't. They use their iPhones and their Macs and they Just Work.

people are beginning to see that they aren't that great after all.

I wish I had Apple stock for every time I've heard this for the last 2 decades.

Sorry

[Comboman]

Sorry, it should say, "Paving the way for forced upgrades to proprietary, Apple-branded EarPod wireless headphones".

Re:Sorry

[cayenne8]

You misspelled Beats.

No...he meant something that actually passes for headphones.....

;)

Out of touch, Apple

[mysidia]

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.

Re:Out of touch, Apple

[jittles]

This is why I am waiting for the iPhone 7s. It's going to remove the Lightning plug and all you have to do is say a 4 hour prayer to save Steve Job's soul every day to charge the device.

Re:Out of touch, Apple

[Dixie_Flatline]

Apple doesn't care about you.

That's fine, they don't have to. Stop asking Apple for things if you don't want to buy their devices. The fact that YOU don't want their devices doesn't mean that other people don't. That the devices don't have these features doesn't mean that they're bad or deficient, merely that they don't meet your requirements. Your requirements are fine, and their phones are fine.

What I don't understand is how every post on /. about Apple's phones becomes a free for all for people to talk about all the things Apple has never done and will never do. Just accept that you're not in their target market and move on.

Or is it that you really ACTUALLY want to buy an Apple phone and be seen with an Apple phone, but you can't because of these sticking points? Like, you really wish that Tim Cook was the guy you were buying stuff from, and not Sundar Pichai?

Just give up and commit to Android. I'm sure you have one now, but none of us that follow Apple care what you think is important on an iPhone. I'm not saying this to be offensive, but seriously, your comments are just taking up space and I can't even filter you out by your score because some other Android user that has the same opinion of Apple is voting you up.

Re:Out of touch, Apple

[Kjella]

This is why I am waiting for the iPhone 7s. It's going to remove the Lightning plug and all you have to do is say a 4 hour prayer to save Steve Job's soul every day to charge the device.

Well, I suppose that could be useful after the App-ocalypse. We might actually get temples dedicated to Jobs, where they recite the book of Jobs aka the Apple EULA. We could have the orthodox church all in white and a reformed church where they worship the rose gold, gray, silver and black which of course hate each other. His followers will declare that there is no god but Jobs, and Siri is his prophet. And they'll all be awaiting the rAPPture, where all the faithful will be uploaded to the iCloud to live forever. Okay, I'll go take my meds now...

Re:Out of touch, Apple

[Dixie_Flatline]

No, but they WON'T. You're asking for a tradeoff that Apple isn't willing to make.

They will never include a memory card slot. They're trying to REDUCE the number of things in the phone so they have more space for other stuff. They don't want a mechanical home button because there are too many failures after people press them for a million times. They've made some choices, and all of them are antithetical to adding a memory card slot.

256GB of storage on the base model? That's a bit of a pipe dream. I'd love it too, but there are precious few devices from any manufacturer that offer it at any tier.

They won't make a removable battery. Not ever. Don't ask for it, don't expect it. It takes up space, and is fundamentally against their design principles. Especially after today, it would make it a lot harder to waterproof (not impossible; I have waterproof cameras that have removable batteries--but it takes up a lot more space).

Their priorities are thin, light phones with as few ports as possible and an extremely locked down configuration that's easier to support. Anything that you ask for that runs counter to those priorities is doomed forever, and that's what I mean when I say Apple doesn't care about you. Your priorities are completely orthogonal to theirs. You want versatility and expandability, and those are perfectly good things to want, but you're barking up the wrong tree.

Biggest thing today

[Kohath]

Today will be the turning point in the way you buy a cellular service plan. In 3 years, we will be talking about how, after the iPhone 7 release with iOS 10's first-class treatment of VoIP services, we no longer need to buy voice minutes on cell phone plans.

Re:Biggest thing today

[EvilSS]

Do voice "minutes" really matter anymore anyway? At least in the US the vast majority (not all plans, but most of them from the big 4) of available plans already include unlimited minutes because no one talks on the phone anymore. It's all about milking users for that data (and this change will benefit carriers since all those VOIP calls will be over the data when the user is off WiFi).

Alternating Years

[blueshift_1]

Why would they release the 8 next year? In recent years, they've do iPhone #S on the alternating years where they keep the same basic design but improve the internals a bit. I think you'll probably have to wait another year for the 8.