iPhone 7: 2015 release date, Force Touch, 32GB base, flat siding
The iPhone 7 and its release date are coming into focus even as Apple enjoys record setting sales of the iPhone 6, struggles to produce sufficient inventory of the Apple Watch, and ponders how best to get its streaming music service off the ground. Amid this transitional time, Apple must consider whether to shake up its smartphone strategy for the second time in twelve months, or whether to play it safe and attempt to ride its current wave of success for another year. Here’s a look at the prospects for the iPhone 7 from top to bottom.
The iPhone 7 presents an opportunity for Apple to incorporate Force Touch from its Watch interface into its smartphone design. The feature allows for a handful of alternate functionality on the Watch, the rough equivalent of right-clicking. Moving that concept to a larger iPhone screen could open up the door for far more alternate commands. But it could also be tricky to incorporate into a more complex interface, and would require iOS app developers to incorporate those commands into the next versions of their apps once users become accustomed to being able to bring up certain Force Touch commands in the built-in apps and interface.
This also marks a turning point for storage capacity. Even as the iPhone 6 climbed to a high end of 128 GB of storage, the low end still clocks in at a mere 16 GB. If the iPhone 7 shifts to a 32-64-128 GB lineup, it takes away Apple’s ability to upsell buyers based on the ineptness of the 16 GB model, and forces the company to come up with new ways to make the higher end variants more attractive to customers.
Apple has a history of redesigning the external styling of the iPhone each time it reaches a new model number. The iPhone 6 marked a return to the curved siding of the first few generations. Some users have suggested Apple may return to the flat siding of the iPhone 4-5 era. However that was less about styling than it was about externalizing the antenna, something which has since been bypassed with the iPhone 6 design. So however Apple changes up the iPhone 7 styling, flat sides are unlikely to be a part of the equation.
Finally there is the matter of when the iPhone 7 will arrive. With sales strong, Apple is in no hurry to launch its next iPhone ahead of schedule. However the traditional twelve month mark will arrive in the September October range, and Apple will want to push a new model to market in that timeframe in 2015, well ahead of the holiday shopping season. The question becomes whether Apple will skip straight to the iPhone 7 this year, or offer an intermediary iPhone 6S in the mean time. That marks the iPhone 7 release date as being either in September-October of 2015, or in September-October of 2016.
Phil Moore
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It would be particularly nice if your designer of this web page selected a MUCH darker color of gray for the text.
It is presently so light that it is very difficult to read.
Thank you!
Maybe a facial recognition feature would be awesome instead of a passcode. Perhaps a eye scanner or a voice recognition feature to unlock the phone