The iPhone 8 is eagerly anticipated — but it won’t come cheap.
According to a New York Times article, the upcoming, tenth-anniversary edition iPhone will be priced at «around» $999 (£779, though it’ll likely cost more in the UK).
The piece also mentions the presence of the long-rumoured face scanner, which will take the fingerprint reader’s place for secure unlocking and mobile payments, as well as inductive charging capabilities.
The current iPhone lineup stretches up to $969 (£757) with the highest-end version of the iPhone 7 Plus, featuring 256GB of internal storage.
Both the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus have three storage options: 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB, with the Jet Black and Product RED colouration eschewing the 32GB model.
AppleInsider recently reported that the iPhone 8 will also feature three configurations, with 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB options.
Apple usually charges an extra $100 for each size bump, which means that a 512GB iPhone 8 could end up costing somewhere around $1,200.
The iPhone 8 will seemingly mark the first massive change in design for Apple’s smartphone since 2014’s iPhone 6, where the baseline model moved from 4″ to 4.7″, and the 5.5″ Plus version was also introduced.
Last year’s iPhone 7 lineup, despite being a new entry in the iPhone’s «tick» cycle (i.e. following an «s» model, the iPhone 6s), largely retained the previous models’ design, moving only the antenna bands and tweaking the camera’s outline.
The special edition iPhone — which will come as an addition to the refreshed «iPhone 7s» and «iPhone 7s Plus» — will apparently remove the traditional home button to make way for an organic light-emitting diode display that should cover up nearly all of the phone’s front.
The back will reportedly return to using glass again, and feature a new dual camera system that sees the two lenses sitting atop one another rather than aligned horizontally.
You can expect to hear more about Apple’s upcoming hardware event in the coming days and weeks.
