The Evolution of the iPhone

Where will Apple’s smartphone go over the next twelve months?

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Apple’s high-end iPhones are likely to be thinner. This is no great surprise. When refreshing its lines, it loves to shave a millimetre or two off the thickness of a product. Far more interesting is the leak reported by Korean website The Elec, which claims ‘[screen manufacturer] LG Display is aiming to upgrade its production facilities for flexible, Gen-6 OLED panels for smaller displays.’ These facilities are LG’s ‘E6 lines in Paju of Gyeonggi Province’, which produce screens exclusively for Apple. So what could we expect from the new screens?

Another Korean website, ETNews, thinks it has the answer. While current touchscreens consist of two layers, one for the capacitive circuitry which overlays the second layer, the OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display, the next generation will integrate the circuits into the OLED panel, making them cheaper, thinner and more power efficient. So could the next iPhone be cheaper as well as thinner? We doubt it. Apple prefers to upgrade its tech while keeping the prices the same, or at least roughly the same, as they were before.

5G or Not 5G