In the event you’ve ever watched a teardown video of among the finest iPhones, you’ll understand how meticulously engineered Apple’s units are, in addition to what number of elements the tech large manages to squeeze into the smartphones’ slender frames.
Effectively, the iPhone’s inside might turn into much more crowded in 2025, as Apple is allegedly engaged on a thinner and lighter motherboard that will permit it to pack that yr’s iPhone 17 with much more elements and probably improve its battery life.
That’s in keeping with Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a powerful observe document for Apple predictions. Writing on Medium, Kuo claimed that Apple would undertake a fabric referred to as RCC, or resin coated copper. This “can cut back the thickness of the mainboard,” Kuo says, “and make the drilling course of simpler as a result of it’s fiberglass-free.”
Nonetheless, this new materials isn’t going to reach in 2024’s iPhone 16, Kuo believes, attributable to “its fragile traits and incapacity to cross drop exams.” That feels like there’s nonetheless loads of work to be executed.
It’s what’s on the within that counts
Let’s face it, many people iPhone customers are fairly adept at fumbling our units and sending them hurtling in direction of an unwelcome confrontation with the bottom. It’s why Apple has strengthened the iPhone in an try to reserve it from destruction, with additions just like the Ceramic Defend designed to chase away accidents brought on by careless butterfingers.
With that in thoughts, if RCC isn’t but sturdy sufficient to cross the drop check, there’s no means it’ll make it into future iPhones till Apple has sufficiently strengthened it. But it looks like Apple isn’t removed from reaching that, given how Kuo thinks it might debut within the iPhone 17 as little as two years from now.
In any case, Kuo believes Apple might want to excellent its RCC mainboards earlier than the third quarter of 2024, at which level it would finalize issues for the subsequent yr’s iPhone.
If Apple can certainly make RCC motherboards sturdy sufficient, it would permit Apple so as to add every kind of performance that the iPhone merely doesn’t have the inner area for in the intervening time. That might probably result in a glut of thrilling new options within the iPhone 17. We’ll be ready to see what occurs.