In a keynote address in San Francisco earlier this morning, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, graced the stage to announce the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
The next gen smartphones will combine a raft of new features, which include waterproof capabilities and a pressure-sensitive home button. However, the biggest change of all will be the removal of the ubiquitous headphone jack. What will replace the jack instead is Apple’s Lightning Port.
The new iPhone will come with lightning connector headphones and a lightning-to-analogue adapter. There’s also the option of purchasing wireless AirPods, which has a battery life of five hours and will set you back a hefty $238.
Schiller said: “Apple EarPods are the most popular headphones in the world. Now we’re moving them to Lightning. Why? Because it provides digital audio, power, and many other advantages that are simply not possible over an analogue connection.”
“The analogue headphone jack has been with us for a very long time. But the reason to move on is courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us,” he added.
Whether that courage will immediately translate into success remains to be seen. But here are some other reasons why you should be excited about the iPhone 7.
First off, the waterproof feature is something that hardcore Apple fans have been clamoring for years. It’s not something new in the ever-evolving smartphone market, but at least you can now say goodbye to your phone getting screwed by pesky spills and splashes.
Performance and battery life for the iPhone 7 series have also been seriously upgraded, with a quad-core Apple A10 fusion chip that makes it twice as fast as the iPhone 6. Apple also estimates that the iPhone 7 will have two hours more battery life than the iPhone 6S.
There’s now optical image stabilisation for the iPhone 7, while a wider f/1.8 aperture will allow you to get in more light in your shots. An anti-flicker feature will help the camera’s shutter deal with artificial light, while there’s a total of four LEDs, so you can look forward to 50 per cent more light in dark areas.
What’s really cool though is that the iPhone 7 plus has an additional 56mm telephoto lens that allows you to maximise your digital zoom up to 10 times. An update will also enable both lenses to create a bokeh effect, something similar to like how a DSLR would.
Schiller said: “On a DSLR you can move lens elements to zoom with a large lens. But on a phone you can’t do that. So we’re using two cameras and two lenses to do the same. The quality of the zoom, even with software zoom, is so much better than before we decided to push it up to 10x.”
Unfortunately, this function is only available on the iPhone 7 plus, so Apple users will have to cough up the extra cash if they want to enjoy it.
Another significant change (besides the removal of the headphone jacks), is the departure of the 16GB model. The iPhone 7 starts at the double the storage space of its predecessors with 32GB, with other models offering 128GB and 256GB.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus will be available in silver, gold, rose gold, and black, while the jet black model is offered exclusively for the 128GB and 256GB models.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are available for preorder at $1048 and $1248 respectively this Friday (9 September), and you will receive it on 16 September. Visit Apple’s official website at www.apple.com/sg.
