Featuring New Glass and Aluminum Design, Retina HD Displays, A11 Bionic Chip, New Single and Dual Cameras with Support for Portrait Lighting, Wireless Charging and Optimized for Augmented Reality
Apple today announced the successor to iPhone 7, aptly named iPhone 8. It is not the iPhone X also announced today. Although, still excellent smartphones that improve upon the previous generation with faster processors, better cameras, and wireless charging — all while keeping pricing the same.
iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus represent a new generation of iPhone in a beautiful all-new glass design. The glass finish is made using a seven-layer color process for precise hue and opacity, delivering a rich depth of color with a color-matched aerospace-grade aluminum bezel, and is water and dust resistant.
The new 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch Retina HD displays with the addition of True Tone adjust the white balance of the display to match the surrounding light for a more natural, paper-like viewing experience. The vibrant wide color gamut Retina HD display offers the best color accuracy in the industry. Redesigned stereo speakers are up to 25 percent louder and deliver deeper bass, enabling richer-sounding music, videos and speakerphone calls.
The new Apple-designed A11 Bionic is the most powerful and smartest chip ever in a smartphone. It’s the same chip in iPhone X, and features a six-core CPU design with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion, offering industry-leading performance and energy efficiency. A new, second-generation performance controller can harness all six cores simultaneously, delivering up to 70 percent greater performance for multi-threaded workloads, giving customers more power while providing the same great battery life. A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. All this power enables incredible new machine learning, AR apps and immersive 3D games.
iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are engineered for the ultimate augmented reality experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. With ARKit, iOS developers can take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras to create games and apps offering fantastically immersive and fluid experiences that go far beyond the screen.
The iPhone 8 takes better photos with improved 12-megapixel camera with a larger and faster sensor, a new color filter and deeper pixels. A new Apple-designed image signal processor delivers advanced pixel processing, wide color capture, faster autofocus in low light and better HDR photos, while a new quad LED True Tone Flash with Slow Sync results in more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds. All this adds up to outstanding photos with vibrant, realistic colors and more detail.
The new camera features a larger and faster sensor, new color filter, deeper pixels and OIS for capturing vibrant photos and videos with more detail. There’s video stabilization, 4K video up to 60fps and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. The Apple-designed video encoder provides real-time image and motion analysis for optimal quality video. With iOS 11, both iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus support HEIF and HEVC for up to two times compression and storage for twice the photos and videos.
iPhone 8 Plus features dual 12-megapixel cameras and introduces Portrait mode with Portrait Lighting, bringing dramatic studio lighting effects to iPhone, allowing customers to capture stunning portraits with a shallow depth-of-field effect in five different lighting styles.
Portrait Lighting is based on extensive research into the art and science of portraiture and core photographic lighting principles. It uses the dual cameras and the Apple-designed image signal processor to recognize the scene, create a depth map and separate the subject from the background. Machine learning is then used to create facial landmarks and add lighting over contours of the face, all happening in real time, giving customers even more power to express themselves through photography
The glass back design on iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus enable a world-class wireless charging solution. Wireless charging works with the established Qi ecosystem, including two new wireless charging mats from Belkin and mophie. A new Apple-designed AirPower mat, coming in 2018, can charge iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods simultaneously.
iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus come with iOS 11, featuring incredible advancements to Portrait mode, while new effects make Live Photos more fun and expressive. iOS 11 also brings augmented reality to hundreds of millions of iOS devices with a new platform for developers to build apps that let users place virtual content on top of real-world scenes. Siri debuts new male and female voices and can translate US English phrases into Chinese, French, German, Italian or Spanish.
“iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are a new generation of iPhone that improve on everything we love about iPhone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus have new glass and aluminum designs, new Retina HD displays and A11 Bionic — the smartest chip ever in a smartphone. Packed with more advanced cameras with Portrait mode and Portrait Lighting, and the highest quality video capture in a smartphone, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus enable the freedom of wireless charging, all with AR optimization like no phone ever before.”
Price and Availability
Both devices will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, September 15 in more than 25 countries and territories, and in stores beginning Friday, September 22, 2017. Color options include pace gray, silver and gold. Interestingly, the 128GB model has been dropped.
- iPhone 8 (4.7″) 64GB – $699
- iPhone 8 (4.7″) 256GB – $849
- iPhone 8 Plus (5.5″) 64GB – $799
- iPhone 8 Plus (5.5″) 256GB – $949
- iPhone X (5.8″) 64GB – $999
- iPhone X (5.8″) 256GB – $1,149
Customers will be able to order iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus beginning Friday, September 15, with availability beginning Friday, September 22, in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UAE, the UK, the US and US Virgin Islands.
iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus will be available in Andorra, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Greenland, Guernsey, Hungary, Iceland, India, Isle of Man, Israel, Jersey, Kuwait, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia and Slovenia beginning Friday, September 29.
Apple-designed accessories including leather and silicone cases in a range of colors will be available starting at $35 (US). Lightning Docks in color-matching metallic finishes will also be available for $49 (US).
Every customer who buys iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus from Apple will be offered free Personal Setup in-store or online to help them customize their iPhone by setting up email, showing them new apps from the App Store and more.
