NEW YORK: KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via AppleInsider)says Apple’s next iPhone may come in a luxury rose gold finish. The analyst, who has a good track record of calling Apple product plans ahead of their official announcement, shared info about the rose gold option in a research note today, and also discussed how there could be a materials switch in the next generation, a camera upgrade and the addition of Force Touch.
The iPhone 6s might also gain an additional microphone to further boost call quality, and some options of the larger, Plus variant could use sapphire screens for additional scratch resistance, though he says those would still have to overcome current drop test challenges before being put into production.
A 12-megapixel camera is also included in Kuo’s list, which would make sense given that Apple has stuck with the 8-megapixel resolution level (though it has made other improvements, including to the size of the pixels on the sensors) for a couple of generations now. With the advent of ever-denser high-resolution displays, switching to a higher resolution camera sensor would have benefits in terms of making iPhone photography even more flexible across a range of different uses.
Force Touch might be the most promising new addition in terms of providing even current-generation iPhone owners with a good reason to upgrade; Apple’s pressure-sensitive touch input opens up a whole range of new potential interaction models, which app developers will presumably be able to take advantage of, meaning we could see a lot of unique software coming for ‘iPhone 6s’ vs. the usual ‘s’ level release.
As usual, take analyst claims with a big grain of salt, but also note that Kuo has a history of being more on the nose than most. Kuo doesn’t mention pricing, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this might foretell an ‘Edition’ version of the iPhone to go with the high-priced Watch.
