Apple Rumors: iPhone 7 To Have DSLR-Quality Pictures? Beats Music Built Into iTunes?
Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have only been available for two months and already the rumors are kicking up about the iPhone 7, with some claiming that Apple will pack a game-changing camera into the next iPhone. Plus, it looks like we finally know what Apple is going to do with Beats Music.
Postulating on future Apple iPhone releases is a year-long hobby, and it starts just about the day after the new generation of iPhone is announced. There’s not a lot known so far, of course, so don’t take too much stock in reports that Apple will dramatically change the design of the iPhone from this year to the next. Apple is pretty predictable with this sort of thing and it’s not likely to change up the iPhone’s main design components a year after it introduced two new models with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
So sorry, Apple dreamers, there’s probably no borderless or 3D display iPhone on the way for you. We do have some good, realistic news, though.
The first bit of news is unconfirmed, but it seems entirely likely. It has to do with Sony announcing the Exmor RS, a CMOS image sensor with an image plan phase detection signal processing function for high-speed — wow, you’re still reading this even though you didn’t understand any of that, right? Well done.
The big deal with the new camera is that it packs terrific power, with effectively 21 megapixels of resolution packed into the size of the image sensor usually seen in your smartphone’s camera. That means that future iPhones could very well take advantage of just this sort of technology. In fact, Sony’s new image sensor will ship to manufacturers starting in April of 2015, likely just before Apple starts finalizing the manufacturing specs for the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
(Because there is going to be an iPhone 7 Plus. The iPhone 6 Plus accounts for about a quarter of Apple’s new iPhone sales, and that’s good enough to make sure the bigger iPhone will have a successor.)
As noted Apple fan John Gruber points out, Apple has long used Sony sensors for iPhone cameras. That makes it a near lock that next year’s iPhones will have these incredible sensors built in. If you’re picking up an iPhone 7 in 10 months — don’t believe the inevitable “early iPhone in June!” rumors — you can look forward to 4K video recording in HDR and superbly high photo resolution.
On the software end of things, you can expect that that new iPhone is going to come with an updated version of Apple’s iOS operating system. Since Apple is still working on updates to the iPhone’s iOS 8, no one quite knows what exactly Cupertino has in mind for iOS 9. Still, we can apparently rest certain that there will be some changes on the iTunes end.
A new report from the Financial Times says that Apple is going to bundle Beats Music in with its iOS operating system early next year. That would give Apple an instant foothold for the music streaming service it bought earlier this year alongside Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats Electronics.
That bundling, according to the new report, is expected to happen as early as March of next year, and you can probably expect Beats to be fully integrated by the time the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus roll out in — again — September.
If Beats is getting primetime placement starting in March, though, that raises yet another question: what else is happening in March? Well, Apple is expected to debut the long-awaited Mark of the Beast Apple Watch some time around the Chinese New Year, which will fall on February 19 next year. Is it possible that we’ll see another special Apple event around that time, perhaps one showing off the release-ready Apple Watch, a revamped Beats Music, and some new Beats Audio hardware?
[Lead image via CNet]
