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iPhone 7

560 'iPhone 7' stories May 2014 - April 2015
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Apple's iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were announced on 7th September 2016

Apple revealed the iPhone 7 on 7th September 2016.

There were few surprises. As expected, the phone was an iteration on the previous iPhone 6/6s, though with tidier antenna lines and camera bump. The only significant design change was two new colors, in the form of a high-gloss Jet Black and a matte black simply known as … Black.

Also as expected, Apple removed the 3.5mm headphone socket in favor of Lightning and wireless headphones – though with an adapter in the box for existing 3.5mm headphones. The company justified the move on the basis that it had better uses for the space, notably the haptic motor for a new touch-sensitive Home key to aid waterproofing, and a better camera, especially in the iPhone 7 Plus. More notably, it announced a new W1 wireless chip for instant, painless pairing with compatible headphones, the pairing propagating across all your devices via iCloud.

The headline new feature was, as predicted, reserved for the iPhone 7 Plus. The dual-camera system provides 2x optical zoom, and uses a combination of parallax effect and machine-learning to separate the foreground from the background to simulate shallow depth of field.

Key links can be found here, then scroll down for the latest stories.

Apple camera patent would allow high-resolution photos without sacrificing image quality

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Apr 2 2015 - 6:22 am PT
23 Comments
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If you were wondering why Apple has ignored the megapixel race and stuck to a modest 8MP camera in its latest iPhones when almost every other manufacturer is cramming in as many pixels as physically possible, it’s all about image quality. While more pixels allow you to blow up photos to larger sizes, that comes at a cost. Squeezing more pixels into a tiny sensor means more noise, reducing quality, especially in low-light situations like bars and parties.

A clever patent granted today could allow future iPhones to have the best of both worlds, allowing higher-resolution photos without squeezing more pixels into the sensor … 
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Latest rumor of OLED displays in iPhones inspired by report on Foxconn display factory

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Jan 8 2015 - 6:54 am PT
5 Comments

There are always rumors around that Apple is planning to switch from LCD to thinner, brighter, more power-efficient OLED displays in its iPhones. The latest is a report seemingly originating on Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun cited by GforGames via a Chinese site … So take it with the usual large pinch of salt.

Bloomberg reported back in November that Foxconn was building a new $2.6B display factory whose output would be exclusively devoted to Apple. The headline was quickly changed to remove the reference to Apple, though the piece still strongly hinted at Apple being the sole client. This latest report says that the factory in question will be making only OLED displays.

It’s worth noting that, even if the factory is indeed making displays only for Apple, and even if all those displays are indeed OLED ones, that still doesn’t necessarily mean you can expect OLED displays in next year’s iPhones. Apple has already announced that the Apple Watch will use OLED displays, so it’s possible that the company is simply diversifying its supply chain for these. LG is currently slated as the primary supplier of Apple Watch displays.

While OLED has a number of advantages over LCD displays, it is more expensive to manufacture, so a switch is not one that Apple would make without a careful cost-benefit analysis.

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Market share of iPhone may increase as U.S. smartphone growth tails off, predicts analyst

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Jul 8 2014 - 5:22 am PT
3 Comments

There are early signs that Apple’s market share of the U.S. smartphone market may increase as we move through the ‘Late Majority’ phase and into ‘Laggards’, suggests Asymco’s Horace Dediu.

For those who weren’t paying attention in economics classes in school, new products tend to experience an S-curve pattern to their growth. In the tech sector, Innovators are pretty much synonymous with techies.

Innovators (first 2.5%) need to be sold on the premise of novelty itself. Early adopters (next 13.5%) seek status and exclusivity. Early majority (34%) seek acceptance and Late Majority (34%) seek pragmatic productivity. Laggards (last 16%) seek safety.

If those percentages appear rather random, it’s because they are derived from the shape of the curve – the typical points at which it gets steeper or shallower.

With U.S. smartphone penetration now at 70 percent, we’re about two years into the Late Majority stage, with around two further years of growth to come. What Dediu’s analysis suggests is that iPhone growth has a steadier pattern to it than Android growth, which appears to be more closely driven by product launches and promotions. The more mature a market, the fewer product launches and promotions there are designed to drive adoption.

Why, when we are in a late stage of the market, does the iPhone do well when users are not incentivized to adopt? As we crossed 70% adoption, 1.4 million more users adopted the iPhone than Android.

Even if we look out to the last six months, iPhone added 15.5 million late majority users while Android added 14.2 million. If promotions decrease for the “late late majority” and laggards then would the iPhone do even better relative to Android?

Dediu points to the featurephone market as support for his hypothesis: at the tail-end of the curve, before smartphones took over, the most popular phone in the U.S. was the RAZR – a premium handset.

Opinion: Can Apple maintain its $100 tier flash storage pricing for iPhones & iPads indefinitely?

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy May 1 2014 - 7:27 am PT
112 Comments
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There’s a certain marketing genius to Apple’s tiered pricing for flash storage on its iPhones and iPads. Since customers can’t add storage via a microSD card later, they have to decide in advance how much storage they need, and many of us are going to err on the side of safety, bumping our purchase up to a higher price-band.

Adding $100 or $200 to the price of an iDevice for maybe $5-10 worth of flash storage/controller capacity is an important source of income for Apple, and one of the reasons its margins are so high. Whatever the company makes on a 16GB device, if it can upsell you to a 32GB or 64GB (or even 128GB, in the case of the iPad), almost all of the premium charged on those beefier models is pure profit.

It’s not money Apple would give up lightly, but I do wonder whether it’s sustainable … 
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