Apple iPhone 8 to have a dramatic design and high price; Reason for the price increase detailed

Apple’s upcoming flagship smartphone iPhone 8 will receive a fresh new design when unleashed in September. The design has been created using leaked schematics of the device. The company has kept the design almost the same since 2014. It’s time for an overhaul.

The Apple iPhone 7s and 7s Plus will also be released in September though they will be minor upgrades from the predecessors. The aluminium casing will be swapped for glass to allow wireless charging. The iPhone 8 will be a complete shift in terms of design. It will have a stainless steel frame between two glass panels. It curves slightly to give the design an appearance of one continuous sheet of glass. It will have an edge-to-edge 5.8-inch OLED Display. It will rival Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus’ 83 percent screen-to-body ratio.

The leaked design of the Apple iPhone 8 does not show a fingerprint scanner at the back. The TouchID sensor will be embedded in the display. The leak also shows a dual-camera architecture that will have the same optical zoom capability of the iPhone 7 Plus camera, a microphone and LED flash. As per News.com.au, the camera module is vertically oriented. This should be in order to fit the front camera, dual camera and new 3D infra-red sensors on the smaller device.

During the event, Apple is also expected to unveil its new augmented reality (AR) features. The iPhone 8 could be specifically designed to enable these AR features. Recently, there have been many rumours about the iPhone 8 running into manufacturing problems. If this turns out to be true, the smartphone may not be hitting the shelves until early 2018 even though the phone is unveiled in September. According to Forbes, the upcoming smartphone will be shockingly expensive and no other iPhone has ever been so expensive.

It could have a starting price of US$1,000 (AU$1,344 approx). The primary reason behind this is that Apple’s long time component supplier TPK Holdings has announced a 2-2.5x price increase for integrating 3D Touch into the iPhone 8 display and the Cupertino tech giant has reported accepted. The OLED Display itself will add about US$35 (AU$47.04 approx) to the overall manufacturing cost. The 3D Sensing technology will add about $20. Considering the fact that the 256GB iPhone 7 Plus already sells at US$969 (AU$1,300), the $1,000 tag seems reasonable.

Apple has never been shy about raising prices. It increased the MacBook Pro prices dramatically with the most recent generation. Stay tuned on IBT AU for more updates on the Apple iPhone 8.