Apple’s iPhone 7 may be a year away
If you’ve been waiting for that allnew, redesigned iPhone in September, you might have to wait a little longer.
Apple will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPhone in 2017, and the company ‘‘historically’’ uses milestones for new redesigns of its products, says Apple analyst Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies.
A 2017 release would disrupt the every-two-years cycle of major design upgrades for the iPhone.
Apple’s last major update was in 2014 with the iPhone 6, which became its best-selling iPhone ever. In off years, it offers new features in a similar design, as with 2015’s iPhone 6S.
A penchant for anniversaries could mix up that schedule. A report from a German Apple news site said Chinese manufacturers are indicating Apple will delay the big redesign to 2017, and instead reveal an iPhone 6se in September.
This follows a similar report in May from the Nikkei Asian Review that Apple was pushing out its product upgrade cycle to three years.
The new phone will still have many new features, says Bajarin, including an improved camera, more memory (starter edition with 32GB of storage, instead of now standard 16GB) more power and a thinner body. Apple announces earnings after the market closes on Wednesday, and is expected to report falling iPhone sales for the second quarter in a row.
Brokerage Piper Jaffray predicts sales of 41 million iPhones in the quarter. That’s down from 51.2 million in the previous quarter, which was 16 per cent lower than the year ago quarter. So have iPhone sales peaked? Bajarin doesn’t think so, and says they can reach highs again, ‘‘if they create a brand new design and introduce something unique and highly innovative. It could cause another super cycle’’.
Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester Research, says it makes sense for Apple to wait a year, to lose a little on the short term, but make up for it in the long term. TNS