The highly-rumoured Apple iPhone 8 is touted to feature a Plus-sized battery in a smaller 4.7in form factor, according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo's latest report to MacRumors. It is further speculated that the bigger sized battery would yield better battery life than a 5.5in iPhone with LCD display.
To be precise, the bigger battery on the iPhone 8 is expected to produce 50% more power as opposed to all existing batteries on a 4.7in iPhone. In other words, the iPhone 8 will have a superior battery life as compared to the 2900mAh battery in the 5.5in iPhone 7 Plus models.
Apple will be reportedly using an expensive logic board design aka substrate-like PCB (SLP) mainboard to make room for a bigger battery inside the device. Besides, the highly power-efficient edge-to-edge OLED display will replace the existing LCD display on the 4.7in models for the iPhone 8.
Consequently, a more power-efficient display will result in lower power consumption for the backlight. However, a stacked mainboard will push up the component manufacturing costs by 80%, which could rightly justify iPhone 8's staggering price tag of over $1,000.
Here are the brief excerpts from Kuo's report:
As battery material tech isn't likely to see major breakthroughs in the next 3-5 years, mainboard area can only be reduced via stacked SLP, which makes space for larger battery and extended usage time.
Thanks to stacked SLP, we expect the OLED iPhone to have similar dimensions to a 4.7-inch LCD iPhone, and have comparable battery capacity (equipped with around 2,700 mAh L-shaped 2-cell battery pack) to a 5.5-inch LCD iPhone.
Meanwhile, the newer iPhone 7 iterations, iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus, are expected to use the regular logic board design to keep their manufacturing costs under check while their battery life will be no different to current-gen iPhone 7 models.
If there is any truth to Kuo's predictions, the iPhone 8 will debut an edge-to-edge OLED display, besides featuring the highly-anticipated wireless-inductive-charging feature as Apple has recently joined the Wireless Power Consortium.
