Apple Loop: New iPhone 8 Leak, Making A Transparent iPhone, Apple's Expensive Obsessions

   Apple Loop: New iPhone 8 Leak, Making A Transparent iPhone, Apple's Expensive Obsessions

Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes iPhone 8 battery and design leaks, making the iPhone 7S cheaper, Apple’s wireless charging standard, how to make a transparent iPhone, the dream of Apple TV, repairing your own hardware, details on WWDC and a look at the doorhandles in Apple’s new HQ.
Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read our weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes).
Batteries, Volumes And The iPhone 8
Of course Apple will mention the tenth-anniversary of the iPhone when this year’s flagship handset is announced, especially with the new features heralding some sort of "reinvention" of the smartphone. The presumptively named iPhone 8 has a number of features  newto Apple, and FORBES contributor Gordon Kelly looks at the relationship between the new compact design and the batteries inside the upcoming smartphone:

Kuo says Apple will fit the iPhone 8 with a 2,700 mAh battery. This is almost 30% larger than the 1960 mAh battery in the iPhone 7 and Kuo says Apple will squeeze it in by using a “higher-cost stacked logic board design”. By stacking the board Apple almost halves the space it takes up thereby freeing up the space necessary for the bigger battery.
Of course the obvious point to make is rivals like the Galaxy S7 (3000 mAh) still have larger batteries, but iOS has always been able to get away with smaller batteries than Android. For example the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus has a 2900 mAh and it is one of the longest lasting smartphones on the market. But the iPhone 8 is purported to have only a circa 5-inch display

Read more here on Forbes.

Apple iPhone 7 (image: Ewan Spence)

Apple's Expensive New Smartphone's Cheaper Less Functional Brothers.
Selling the brand-new iPhone for a minimum of $1,000 is going to do wonders for Apple’s bottom line, but it’s not going to be suitable for everyone. Luckily Apple has a plan for the rest of the portfolio, and that means following tradition and bumping the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus up to the 7S and 7S Plus. Gordon Kelly looks over the rest of the portfolio:

... the iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus will not include the Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor supplied with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. There will be no Lightning to USB Type-C adaptor either, Apple’s preferred standard for its MacBook range. No reason for this was given.
To get a handle on it, it helps to understand Apple’s strategy for 2017. The company will release three premium iPhones: the iPhone 8 (some say it will be called the ‘iPhone X’), the iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus. The former will be a radical redesign to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone while the latter two will retain the same designs launched with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in 2014.

Speaking of wireless charging....
Apple's Wireless Charging May Be Standard
... Apple has confirmed this week that it has joined the Wireless Power Consortium. This strongly suggests that wireless charging will be featured in the flagship smartphone. It also suggests Apple has made a decision about which charging method it will use:

The decision is a simple one but it will have repercussions for existing wireless users looking at the iPhone, part of Apple's strategy for the next few years, and the impact of the iPhone 8 on the wireless charging ecosystem. Will Apple use an existing standard and promote interoperability, or will it tweak the implementation of induction to use its own proprietary method?
With Apple joining the Wireless Power Consortium, I think it would be fair to suggest that Apple is going to look towards the former and use the existing standards.

More thoughts here on Forbes.

Wireless Charging The iPhone 6 (image: Ewan Spence)

Turning Transparency On
The talk of Apple addressing mixed reality in the next iPhone continues to increase in volume (not least because Tim Cook keeps bringing up the idea in ever on the record interview he does). The mythical transparent iPhone would be in a perfect position to implement mixed reality, but you can’t make a phone see-through. Can you?

The iPhone already has a number of elements that are required for mixed reality. It has positioning and spatial awareness. The forward-facing camera could be used to gather information about the user’s relative position and glance. The rear camera can look out into the world (and with a dual-lens system a stereoscopic view could extrapolate depth and distance information). Bring in the image from the rear, do some transformative maths to create the best fit of the image so it matches the perspective of the environment as much as possible, and start overlaying the mixed reality data.
This would be far less threatening for end users. The mixed reality enabled iPhone would look and feel like an iPhone, it would be comfortable, but it would also be able to switch into mixed reality mode and Apple’s software could start delivering the benefits of mixed reality through an app.