iPhone 8 Release: Apple Seems Very Confident About September
The iPhone 8 will launch in September, except it'll actually be delayed, or maybe it'll arrive on time but stock will be so limited you won't get one until the holidays. The past few months haven't exactly helped if you've been trying to time your next iPhone upgrade, with leaks from the supply chain warning of delays for Apple's new flagship, analysts weighing in with their own speculation, and a general cloud of "can they build enough in time" lending the whole affair a sense of ominous foreboding. All except, that is, for Apple itself.
In fact, while their suppliers, detail-digging assessors, leaky assemblers, and the rest of the assembled crowd – tech news sites like ourselves included – discuss when is really feasible for what's shaping up to be the most interesting iPhone in years to go on sale, Apple just dropped some very heavy hints among the controversy. No, the Cupertino firm didn't come out and say "this is when the iPhone 8 will go on sale," since that would be the kiss of death to any remaining iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus sales. Instead, it signposted it with its most recent financial results.
Announced yesterday, it was another solid quarter for Apple. Indeed, even with new iPhones on the horizon, sales of the current models were up in the company's third fiscal quarter of 2017. More than 41m units were sold in the three months, in fact, running counter to the traditional pattern of a slump before refreshed hardware.
So far so good, but the really interesting part came when Apple estimated its financial performance for the next quarter. The market had been predicting a solid quarter, but Apple CEO Tim Cook still prompted some surprise when he suggested fiscal Q4 2018 would see $49 to $52 billion. For comparison, in this solid past quarter the company managed revenues of $45.4 billion, itself up 7-percent year-over-year.
It's a heavy hint from a company that generally eschews dropping news until it's absolutely ready to launch. Although updated iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models – expected to be the iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus, if Apple continues with its now-traditional nomenclature – will undoubtedly prompt sales, they're almost certain to be refinements and tweaks over existing hardware, rather than all-out new designs. That wow-factor should come courtesy of the iPhone 8, as the handset has become unofficially known.
There's plenty of pitfalls that could affect it. Apple is expected to use OLED for its screen, a first for the iPhone, and with only Samsung Display currently able to meet the Cupertino firm's stringent requirements, it's unclear whether panel supplies will be too constrained to meet overall demand. It's not like they could balance that with LCD, either; recent leaks from the HomePod firmware suggest Apple will be taking advantage of OLED's support for non-rectangular shapes to make a display with an unusual notch taken out of the top section. Meanwhile, given any new iPhone launch generally sees interest in the handset outstrip how many Apple can produce, there may end up shortages of other components like batteries and memory chips.
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Balancing that out, perhaps, are the ongoing suggestions that the iPhone 8 will be the most expensive iPhone to-date. The consensus from analysts is that it'll be in the $1k bracket from the get-go, with higher-spec versions adding several hundred dollars more to that figure. It'll be enough to dissuade many buyers who simply can't afford it.
Apple has undoubtedly done the math itself, and worked out its own set of predictions. Still, a September release date for the iPhone 8 increasingly seems a solid expectation, with initially constrained supplies gradually loosening as the quarter goes on.