iPhone 8 and beyond

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• Date: 2016-05-09
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Where is smartphone technology going? What does the future hold? And what will Apple's iPhones look like in 2018, in 2020, in 2030 and beyond? We look ahead to the iPhone 8 and beyond

When will Apple launch the iPhone 8, and how different will it be from today's smartphones? What about the new smartphones Apple launches in 2020 and beyond?

Here at Macworld we spend a lot of time wondering about the next generation of Apple devices (and if you share our curiosity, take a look at our iPhone 7, iPad mini 5 and Apple Watch 2 preview articles). But sometimes it pays to take a step back and think about the longer term, and the bigger picture. Where is technology going? What does the future hold? And what will Apple's smartphones look like in 2018, in 2020, in 2030 and beyond?

In this article we'll discuss some of the routes that smartphone technology could take in the coming years, starting with the iPhone 8, which by current trends ought to appear in 2018. As we move further into the future our predictions will by necessity become more and more speculative, and many of these paths will no doubt turn out to be blind alleys. But we're happy to put on our future goggles and make some predictions about trends we're expecting in the next few years. If you want to know what kind of iPhone you'll be brandishing in the future, read on.

iPhone 8 and beyond: Battery & power developments

Again and again the UK Tech Weekly Podcast returns to the topic of 'peak smartphone': the idea that the smartphone's golden period of rapid technological advances and wide experiential differences (between one generation and the next, or between one manufacturer and another) is now over. The smartphone has become commoditised, and there are only small, iterative differences between the phone that just launched and the one you bought last year - hence less incentive to upgrade. Smartphones are now essentially 'good enough'.
 

Well, maybe. Perhaps the greatest potential growth area - yet, for various counterintuitive reasons, one of the most neglected thus far - is battery life. Battery tech keeps getting better, but smartphone makers (and Apple is guilty of this more than almost anyone) keep cramming in higher-res screens and higher-power processors that use up the extra power just as quickly; or they select a slimmer albeit more efficient battery cell so they can say the phone is thinner than ever before, with the same effect.

In the next few years, we suspect, battery life is going to become more of a priority for phone makers and consumers. Partly this is because phones are now about as slim and fast as anyone could ever want; but partly it's because some cool battery tech developments are starting to come within the reach of mobile consumer budgets.

Read more: How to improve iPhone battery life

Stacked battery cells

One persistent rumour holds that Apple will take the battery tech it developed for the original 12-inch MacBook (and retained for the 2016 version) - whereby contoured, layered battery units are stacked inside the chassis in order to take up every possible inch of space - and use these to squeeze more battery capacity inside the fixed or even reduced volume that will be available in future iPhones.

Apple could even, thanks to the new technology, make more radical changes to the overall design of the iPhone, because its engineers would no longer to base their work on a fixed battery shape. Although the smartphone is such a mature market now that it would take a brave manufacturer to change its essential form - a little like a rogue microwave builder coming out with one that's spherical.

Lithium-air batteries

The capacity and efficiency of batteries is sure to increase over the next few years, and may do so dramatically if lithium-oxygen cells (also known as lithium-air) become a reality. As a Nature study (you'll need to pay to read the full article) explains, Li–O2 batteries offer theoretically far higher lifetimes than the lithium-ion equivalents currently favoured in mobile devices - maybe as much as five times as much, although technological issues remain.

But we're still thinking in terms of conventional battery principles: batteries than need to be charged up from a mains supply, and then run down, and then need to be charged up again.

Motion charging

A different approach is offered by technologies such as motion charging, a principle that has been used in numerous watches going back many years and was reportedly considered by Apple when putting together the first Apple Watch. It uses kinetic energy from your own movements to charge up a battery cell - the traditional model would be for a wristwatch to harness the power of your arm swinging back and forth throughout the day, but similar methods have been used by wearable phone chargers that generate sufficient power in this way to give an extra hour of life to the average phone from a mere, er, 5,000 steps.

Okay, so the tech needs improvement to achieve mass-market acceptance,and it would be better still if technology of this kind could be integrated into the body of the phone itself (it's also vital for it to be able to collect a worthwhile amount of power from the smaller-scale movements experienced by a phone in a pocket or handbag rather than on the end of an arm). But it's an appealingly sustainable way of collecting some of that energy you're otherwise wasting on things like 'moving from one place to another' and 'getting fit'.