Next year, Apple is expected to release a completely redesigned iPhone 8 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone. Following three consecutive years of seeing the same design reused in the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone 7, Apple is expected to make dramatic changes to the appearance of its next-generation iPhone, and to the technology included inside the device. Previous reports have stated that the new iPhone 8 will feature an OLED display that covers almost all of the phone’s face, and the home button and fingerprint scanner will be embedded beneath the screen. The phone is also expected to have a glass back instead of aluminum, and metal will surround the outer edges as it did on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4.
According to a new report, however, these claims have it all wrong and the iPhone 8’s new design will be unlike anything the world has ever seen.
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According to everything we’ve heard so far from tried and true sources, next year’s iPhone 8 sounds pretty terrific. The new OLED screen is long overdue and Apple’s removal of the home button may finally let it shrink down the overall size of its iPhones without decreasing the size of the displays. Fans are excited enough as it is, but now a new report claims that Apple’s upcoming iPhone redesign is far more revolutionary than any previous rumors claimed.
“The next iPhone will be, I am told, a clear piece of glass (er, Gorilla Glass sandwich with other polycarbonates for being pretty shatter resistant if dropped) with a next-generation OLED screen (I have several sources confirming this),” wrote longtime tech blogger and current Entrepreneur in Residence at UploadVR in a post on Facebook. “You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it.”
He says the next-generation iPhone will be clear — as in, completely transparent so that users can see straight through it — so that Apple can use it to power an augmented reality experience similar to the one offered by Microsoft’s HoloLens.
“The phone itself has a next-generation 3D sensor from Primesense, which Apple bought,” Scoble added. “Apple has 600 engineers working in Israel on just the sensor. It’s the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. It’s the first product introduction in Apple’s new amazing headquarters. It’s a big f**king deal and will change this industry deeply.”
He continued, “Also, updates from new sources: expect battery and antennas to be hidden around the edges of the screen, which explains how Apple will fit in some of the pieces even while most of the chips that make up a phone are in a pack/strip at the bottom of the phone.”
This all sounds absolutely incredible… and completely implausible. First, we’re years away from having technology that would enable Apple to build an iPhone like the one Scoble describes with a battery and antennas “hidden around the edges of the screen” that would last longer than about 4 minutes on a charge. We’ve seen some pretty spectacular tech as far as transparent displays are concerned — check out this invisible TV from Panasonic, which is incredible — but scaling it down to a device the size of a smartphone isn’t happening in 2017.
Beyond that, this contradicts everything we’ve heard so far from the most reliable sources in the world when it comes to leaking Apple’s plans, such as The Wall Street Journal and KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Scoble has plenty of sources in the startup world and he’s had some scoops in the past, but he doesn’t quite have the kind of track record with Apple scoops that would make us confident in these outlandish claims, however much we’d love for them to be true.
