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 5and 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 reportedlyconsidered 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'.
Solar
A similar technology category that seems likely in the foreseeable future to supplement rather than supplant traditional battery-charging methods is solar power. Sunpartner Technologies has developed a lightweight skin/case that wraps around a mobile device and collects energy from light that falls on it. This is designed to work with both indoor and natural light, but is obviously better with the latter; in the right circumstances the tech could add some 10 to 15 percent to battery life.
Apple, of course, has been committing itself to a greener approach for some time now, and a patent awarded in 2015 demonstrates this strategy in action.
The patent suggests that Apple is planning to build solar cells underneath the touchscreen on smartphones in future. The panel would recharge during the day and you wouldn't need to plug your phone into the socket any more. Good for the planet, convenient for us. And while unlikely to appear as early as 2016's iPhone 7, this could easily be ready for the big reveal when the iPhone 8 takes its bow in 2018.
Energy harvesting
Finally, energy-harvesting technology exists right now that can recapture energy emitted from your phone in the form of radio waves (the wasted ones, not the ones essential to communication) and then feed it back into the battery. This isn't a long-term solution: some energy will inevitably be lost through emitted waves alone, and you've got all the power being used running the internal components and lighting up the screen, among other issues. But it means your battery runs down slower - 25 to 30 percent, the makers say.
These three in their present form - niche, semi-experimental, relatively costly, non-integrated, offering significant but not experience-changing increases to battery life and just generally a bit of a faff - are not enormously appealing to the average smartphone owner. But if we jump ahead 10 years, maybe less, imagine an iPhone with all three (and similar related tech) built discreetly into the case: harvesting energy from your bodily movements, from ambient light, and from the phone's own emitted radio waves. To the extent that battery life ceases to be a concern - to the extent, perhaps, where mobile batteries become self-sustaining. What a thought.
We are indebted for the help we gained when writing the above thoughts to Technology Review's helpful summary of the future of battery technology.
iPhone 8 and beyond: Durable design
iPhones are that lethal combination of expensive and fragile that results in so much consumer heartache. The result is that each iPhone owner has to make their own deal with the devil: either wrapping it in a robust case, thereby masking the handsome design that they paid all that money for in the first place, or risk pavement damage every time they take the thing out of a pocket.
This may not be the case in the future.
Read next: How to repair a cracked iPhone screen
Sapphire
iPhone screens are already far tougher than your average piece of glass (they're made of a proprietary material called Gorilla Glass), but they do sometimes crack or even shatter when dropped. Sapphire screens would be more resistant still, and Apple is already using sapphire in the display of the Apple Watch: it's possible that the company is now ready to import this material into its smartphone line-up.
Rumoured plans to rely on an Apple-backed sapphire plant in Arizona (which had the capacity to manufacture 200 million 5-inch iPhone displays per year) fell through. But more recent reports suggest that long-term Apple supplier Foxconn is gearing up to build its own sapphire plant in Taiwan at a cost of $2.6bn.
Project Phire
Corning, the company that makes Gorilla Glass, responded to the looming threat of sapphire glass in early 2015 with the announcement of an ultra-hardened composite material codenamed Project Phire.
James Clappin, president of Corning Glass Technologies, told investors: "We told you last year that sapphire was great for scratch performance but didn't fare well when dropped. So we created a product that offers the same superior damage resistance and drop performance of Gorilla Glass 4 with scratch resistance that approaches sapphire."
Apple never discusses the materials it uses for iPhone screens, but it's great news for consumers that suppliers are jousting to provide the best and most durable screen glass.
Read more about Project Phire here.
Graphene
Sapphire glass is already being used on the non-Sport models of the Apple Watch, and Project Phire appears to be in a reasonably advanced state of development, but we're getting closer to the realms of science-fiction.
Graphite, the material used in standard pencils, is made up of stacks of sheets of carbon, each one only a single atom thick. This is why it's so good for writing: the layers naturally slide off on to the paper.
But graphene is a different matter. Graphene is what you get if you're clever enough to isolate one of the layers in graphite, leaving you with a substance that's effectively two-dimensional. It's the thinnest substance known to man, about a million times thinner than a human hair, and for that matter quite possibly the strongest (it's 100 times stronger than steel) and a phenomenally good electrical conductor - 1,000 times better than copper. Oh, and it's virtually transparent, too.
All of which makes graphene an exciting prospect for tech manufacturers. Most obviously, it would make for a tremendously durable coating material for the screen (and would lend itself to bendable displays, too) or indeed any part of the device; but it could really appear in almost any of the sections of this article. Graphene would be a superior replacement for silicon in processor chips, or could be used to make more efficient batteries and solar cells. It's marvellous stuff.
We're also pleased to report that graphene is British - sort of. It was discovered by the Soviet-born physicist Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, where it continues to be studied. (Entertainingly, Geim is the only scientist so far to be awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel prize.)
If you'd like to read more about graphene, I strongly recommend the New Yorker'sarticle on the subject.
Viscoelastic material
Let's move on from the screen and talk about new durable materials for the rest of the iPhone.
How about a bit of drop-resistance? Based on patent activity, Apple is devising aviscoelastic material that would absorb impacts. The material would cover Apple devices and make them survive drops far better.
This is a patent that could make sense in all of Apple's mobile devices and laptops, but the iPhone is the obvious area to begin.
Flexible iPhone
In January 2015 Apple was awarded a patent that suggests that the company is investigating the idea of a flexible iPhone (and we're not talking about the #Bendgate kind).
The Patent suggests that, by making the iPhone flexible, the user could open a specific application by bending it in a particular way, or even use the flexibility to control a game.
Additionally, by making the iPhone flexible, the device should be more resistant to impacts and therefore more durable. But we'll discuss a key element in the idea of a flexible iPhone - a screen that can bend without breaking - in the screen tech section.
Waterproof components
The materials we've discussed so far and primarily aimed at surviving impact damage, but almost as common a problem for iPhone owners is water damage. One of our most popular articles is a tutorial explaining how to dry out an iPhone that's got wet: it's a distressingly common thing to happen to a device that costs several hundred pounds and contains important data.
For this reason readers and pundits frequently speculate on the possibility that future iPhones will be waterproof. Indeed, the most recent generation of iPhone models are the most waterproof yet; but we still wouldn't be pleased if the iPhone 6s fell in a paddling pool.
Well, iPhones in the near future could be waterproof without sacrificing their looks - as is currently the case, with the best will in the world, when packing a mobile device in a waterproof case.
A patent spotted in March 2015 indicates that Apple is working to make the internal components of the iPhone waterproof using a protective coating, preventing them from being damaged in the event that liquid manages to make its way beneath the chassis.
LIQUID EXPULSION FROM AN ORIFICE
And while we're on the subject of waterproofing...
A patent published on 12 November 2015 suggests a peculiar but rather appealing solution to the waterlogging issue: a mechanism that lets an iPhone dry itself by pumping liquid out through its speaker grills.
Patent application 20150326959, wonderfully, is called LIQUID EXPULSION FROM AN ORIFICE.
"The embodiments described herein are directed to an acoustic module that is configured to remove all or a portion of a liquid that has accumulated within a cavity of the acoustic modules," the patent's summary reads.
The concept is centred around modules within the speaker cavities that can be made hydrophobic to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the charge applied to them: when liquid is detected, charges would be applied across the various modules in such a way that the liquid would be moved across the modules and ultimately expelled from the cavity.
iPhone 8 and beyond: Screen developments
The screen is an iPhone's centrepiece and crowning glory: the medium via which you interact with your phone and your phone tells you about the world. iPhones don't historically tend to have the best screen resolution, but they are solidly sharp and highly responsive - and occasionally Apple evens adds new features, such as 3D Touch and Night Shift.
Here's where we see the iPhone screen heading in the next few years.
3D display...
An iPhone in the near future could come with a 3D display, according to Economic Daily News, which claims that Apple supply chain partner TPK is working on a project that relates to "naked eye 3D screen" - in other words, a 3D screen that doesn't require glasses to see. Having to pop on a pair of 3D specs every time you use the phone would be a buzzkill.
...or hologram cells
But 3D is very 2009, isn't it? We'd like to see Apple go a step beyond and really capture our imagination with a hologram display, able to project the screen image as a three-dimensional hologram you can view from different angles and even interact with. You might have to wait a while for this one.
At the moment about the best you can manage from a consumer smartphone is a 'holographic effect', based on eye-tracking technology. Not quite what we're looking for, but still fun:
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