New iPhone 7 Photos Reveal Essential Upgrade

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Right now the iPhone 7 needs a win. Now, on the back of falling sales and growing fears that Apple AAPL +1.64%’s next iPhone will be a worrying case of same old same old, it may just have found a small one…

Riding to the rescue is ever fruitful Chinese microblogging website Weibo with the news Apple plans to give aspirational iPhone 7 users an essential upgrade: a bigger battery. The bad news? It’s not the kind of jump you might expect – especially for a handset controversially expected to free up a lot of internal space by removing the headphone jack.

So what do we get? The Weibo report brings us photos, allegedly from the factory floor, showing batteries the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. According to their codes they reveal the phones will get 1735 mAh and 2810 mAh capacity batteries respectively.

Yes, this is a small increase from the iPhone 6S (1715mAh) and iPhone 6S Plus (2750mAh) but actually still a notable step down from the iPhone 6 (1810mAh) and iPhone 6 Plus (2915mAh).

Should you believe the rumours? At this stage it’s impossible to tell, though it would odd to invent a rumour based on such a modest – even underwhelming – spec bump.

Does it mean the iPhone 7 will have battery life no better than its predecessors? Not necessarily. Much will depend on the efficiency of Apple’s new A10 chipset, though the removal of the headphone jack will mean the Lightning port will also need to power any digital headphones without their own battery pack – a new source for iPhone battery drain.

So yes, potentially we still have a small win here though it’s equally likely the lack of a more substantial improvement will lead many to see this as bad news.

In fact this is starting to become a theme with the iPhone 7: incremental improvements. And an ‘iPhone 6SS’ is not going to sell Apple’s handset sales once again blow away sales expectations.

Of course there is a big reason still to be cheerful: plenty of time remains for Apple to surprise us. Increasingly, however, it looks like the real innovation may not be until 2017 and the radical ‘all glass’ iPhone 8…

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