Apple is expected to unveil the next iPhone in two months time, as we simply assume the final product name to be the iPhone 8 for now, two iOS developers Steve Throughton-Smith and Guillherme Rambo have happened to find out more design details of the next iPhone by extracting the official Apple HomePod firmware. The Apple HomePod is the company’s answer to Google Home and Amazon Echo, which is a smart speaker that has Siri interacting with your voice commands, hence getting such information from the HomePod’s firmware seem possible as it would have certain codes to work with Apple’s future devices.
Me too. New bezel-less form factor as well pic.twitter.com/Y0RrSOk2OO
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) July 31, 2017
The firmware reveals a line of codes related to Face Detection, while in the other screenshot it reveals a line saying “biometric ID enabled, but neither touchID nor pearlID is enabled’, stating the possibility of the omission of the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, hence leading to the assumption of a bezel-less form factor similar to the Galaxy S8, hardware such as the front camera, ambient sensors and face recognition infrared sensor will reside on a centre bezel on the top.
It would look interesting on how Apple would do away with physical authentication hardware on the iPhone 8, since things such as Apple Pay depend on Touch ID for authorizing transactions, it would be really cool if Apple had implemented Touch ID right under its display like how Vivo has demonstrated back in MWC Shanghai, a technology which is technically owned by Qualcomm. As for now, all we can do is to wait for more renders as the time draws closer to the phone’s release.
