The next iPhone may not come with its iconic Home button. Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, a full-service investment bank and asset management firm, says so. In a note to investors, he mentions that the new iPhone could ditch the home button and increase the display size. It may also improve the battery life and offer the phone with a sapphire screen.
He wrote, “As many have speculated, the addition of 3D Touch may provide Apple with a way to eliminate the home button on the phone and use the additional space to make the screen bigger or make the device smaller. One barrier to this could be Touch ID, which is integrated into the home button currently. Apple would need to move the Touch ID reader to potentially the side of the phone to remove the home button.” He mentioned Apple’s Macbooks and how the company has almost doubled its battery life and it could follow the same path with the iPhones but using more efficient processors and software. He also suggests that Apple may use a sapphire screen on the next iPhone.
Munster is not the only one to speculate on the iPhone 7. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities believes that the next generations of the iPhone will be as thin as the current iPod Touch and iPad Air 2. Apple has also been granted a patent for flexible electronic devices and it is possible that the iPhone 7 will feature that technology. The patent abstract states, “flexible electronic device may include a flexible display, a flexible housing and one or more flexible internal components configured to allow the flexible electronic device to be deformed.” It theorises that the device can be created using an OLED display, which is mounted on a flexible device housing which will include a flexible circuit board and a flexible battery. It was also reported that the next iPhone could be powered by A10 chipset that’s made by Intel. This would mean that Apple is moving away from Samsung and TSMC for the manufacture of their chipsets.
Source: Barron’s