Leaks Reveal New Features In Apple's Next iPhone

Though Apple officially unveils their newest iPhone on Tuesday, information is already leaking on the internet.

• Mashable: "Physically, it's expected to be about the same size as an iPhone 7, but with an edge-to-edge OLED display that's bigger than what is currently on the iPhone 7 Plus. It won't have a home button or Touch ID, and will likely use some kind of facial recognition tech to unlock."

• MacRumors cites a report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggesting facial recognition may just be one feature of a complex front camera with 3D sensing hardware, including a proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, and a structured light transmitter (using a surface-emitting laser) and receiver.

• CNET: "Irish iPhone programming guru Steve Troughton-Smith now feels sure he has the names of the three phones to be launched by Apple on Tuesday.... they'll (probably) be called the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and -- ta-da -- the iPhone X."

• Troughton-Smith also predicts a 3x screen at 1125x2436 resolution

• Fortune: "Apple's iPhone line is expected to catch up with Android phones in the area of wireless charging this year... just lay the phone down on a compatible charger mat or base or dock, and watch the battery fill up."

• 9to5Mac: "We've found a brand new feature called 'Animoji', which uses the 3D face sensors to create custom 3D animated emoji based on the expressions you make into the camera. Users will be able to make Animoji of unicorns, robots, pigs, pile of poo and many more."

Comments

Oh joy....

[Rick Zeman]

"Users will be able to make Animoji of unicorns, robots, pigs, pile of poo and many more.""

We've hit rock bottom....

Re:Oh joy....

[thegarbz]

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Solving "all of the other of the world's problems" would result in no progress ever again.

That said this specific thing is quite stupid.

I'm curious about the facial recognition

[93 Escort Wagon]

Initial rumors were they couldn't get TouchID working without an actual home button, and facial recognition was a fallback. I have a hard time seeing how that won't be a big step backward... so I'll be curious to see the announcement on Tuesday AND how well (or how poorly) it works in the real world.

TouchID works quite well, so the bar is pretty high.

Re:I'm curious about the facial recognition

[doctorvo]

Initial rumors were they couldn't get TouchID working without an actual home button

They might have a look at the dozens of Android phones that manage to do just that.

Re:I'm curious about the facial recognition

[Hognoxious]

They want my fingers? They'll have to pry them from my cold ... dead ...

Oh, fuck it.

Re:3x

[thesupraman]

Apple doesnt appear to realise that you can scale bitmaps to any size, especially on screen way better than most peoples eyes can handle (and with heavy GPUs that can trivially manage complex scaling algorithms) - so their resolutions are usually an exact multiples of the original iPhone.

This would be 3 times the original resolution.

You are expected to know this, because not to is blasphemy against the one great fashion.

It's easy to predict the next iPhone's features

[elrous0]

Just look at the list of features on a good Android phone from a year ago and then double the price. Bingo!

Re:It's easy to predict the next iPhone's features

[Opportunist]

You forgot to remove a feature people actually used and replace it with some stupid gimmick nobody asked for to give tech journalists something to write about.

Re:It's easy to predict the next iPhone's features

[elrous0]

Yeah, "The new iPhone comes with an automatic feature that locates nearby restaurants when it hears your stomach growl" should get you at least 10 fawning articles in Wired and several segments on The Tonight Show where a half-drunk Jimmy Fallon calls it the greatest thing ever.

If Apple were a democracy ...

[mikael]

and compromises had to be made, the iPhone would look like this:

https://i.redditmedia.com/i2AK...

Re:If Apple were a democracy ...

[elistan]

Less storage than a Nomad? Lame.

Will the masses burn out from this churn?

[swb]

It seems more and more obvious that the utility value for smartphones generally peaked some time ago - messaging/email, web, photos and apps to some degree anywhere you are seems like the primary utility function of the smartphone.

Yet companies like Apple are on this business treadmill where they think they have to re-invent it every year in order to keep selling phones. They mostly coasted on the fact that the next model improved some aspects -- CPU, storage, photo quality -- some noticeable increment, but they didn't really increase the basic utility value.

It really seems like they've hit the point where not even technical incremental improvement adds very much, and now they're needlessly altering the experience just to sell new phones.

Maybe this works with some segment of the population, but will people generally start rebelling against this? Most of these changes don't seem like a better experience, at best the *same* experience that requires re-learning, at worst a lesser experience.

Re:Will the masses burn out from this churn?

[Moridineas]

That's what I was saying--that the iphone 6/6s/7 are all one "generation" despite the nomenclature. Apple broke the pattern there.

Facial recognition without button. How?

[BlackPignouf]

How is facial recognition supposed to work without any button?
Is the camera always recording and scanning even when the phone is supposedly off?

Re:can't admit a mistake

[DontBeAMoran]

So to unlock your phone you... put your finger into it's back hole? Sounds kinky.

Re:3x

[thegarbz]

What is a "3x screen"? Tried Googling, results unenlightening.

Disagree I just searched "xxx screen" and found the results not only enlightening but also quite arousing.

Privacy Concern?

[dcw3]

So what happens when a cop grabs your phone, and wants in? Does he get to just hold it up to your face to unlock it? If so, this seems like a serious flaw.