iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus: A new generation of iPhone

Cupertino, California — Apple today announced a new generation of iPhone: iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. The new iPhone features a new glass and aluminium design in three beautiful colours made out of the most durable glass ever in a smartphone, Retina HD displays and A11 Bionic chip, and is designed for the ultimate augmented reality experience. The world’s most popular camera gets even better with single and dual cameras featuring Portrait Lighting on iPhone 8 Plus, and wireless charging brings a powerful new capability to iPhone. Both devices will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, 15 September in more than 25 countries and territories, and in stores beginning Friday, 22 September.

“iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are a new generation of iPhone that improve on everything we love about iPhone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus have new glass and aluminium designs, new Retina HD displays and A11 Bionic — the smartest chip ever in a smartphone. Packed with more advanced cameras with Portrait mode and Portrait Lighting, and the highest quality video capture in a smartphone, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus enable the freedom of wireless charging, all with AR optimisation like no phone ever before.”

iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus introduce a beautiful glass back design made with the most durable glass ever in a smartphone in three new finishes: space grey, silver and gold. The glass finish is made using a seven-layer colour process for precise hue and opacity, delivering a rich depth of colour with a colour-matched aerospace-grade aluminium bezel, and is water and dust resistant.¹

The new 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch Retina HD displays with the addition of True Tone adjust the white balance of the display to match the surrounding light for a more natural, paper-like viewing experience. The vibrant wide colour gamut Retina HD display offers the best colour accuracy in the industry. Redesigned stereo speakers are up to 25 per cent louder and deliver deeper bass, enabling richer-sounding music, videos and speakerphone calls.  

A11 Bionic, is the smartest and most powerful chip ever in a smartphone, features a six-core CPU design with two performance cores that are 25 per cent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 per cent faster than the A10 Fusion, offering industry-leading performance and energy efficiency. A new, second-generation performance controller can harness all six cores simultaneously, delivering up to 70 per cent greater performance, for multi-threaded workloads, giving customers more power while providing the same great battery life. A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 per cent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. All this power enables incredible new machine learning, AR apps and immersive 3D games.

The cameras on iPhone 8 Plus are custom tuned for the ultimate AR experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. With ARKit, iOS developers can take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras to create games and apps offering fantastically immersive and fluid experiences that go far beyond the screen.

The world’s most popular camera gets even better, featuring an improved 12-megapixel camera with a larger and faster sensor, a new colour filter and deeper pixels. A new Apple-designed image signal processor delivers advanced pixel processing, wide colour capture, faster autofocus in low light and better HDR photos, while a new quad LED True Tone Flash with Slow Sync results in more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds. All this adds up to outstanding photos with vibrant, realistic colours and more detail.

The new camera also delivers the highest quality video capture ever in a smartphone with better video stabilisation, 4K video up to 60fps and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. The Apple-designed video encoder provides real-time image and motion analysis for optimal quality video. With iOS 11, both iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus support HEIF and HEVC for up to two times compression and storage for twice the photos and videos.

iPhone 8 Plus features dual 12-megapixel cameras and introduces Portrait mode with Portrait Lighting, bringing dramatic studio lighting effects to iPhone, allowing customers to capture stunning portraits with a shallow depth-of-field effect in five different lighting styles.

Portrait Lighting is based on extensive research into the art and science of portraiture and core photographic lighting principles. It uses the dual cameras and the Apple-designed image signal processor to recognise the scene, create a depth map and separate the subject from the background. Machine learning is then used to create facial landmarks and add lighting over contours of the face, all happening in real time, giving customers even more power to express themselves through photography.²

The glass back design enables a world-class wireless charging solution. Wireless charging works with the established Qi ecosystem, including two new wireless charging mats from Belkin and mophie, available from apple.com/au and Apple Stores.

Apple gave a sneak peek of AirPower, an Apple-designed wireless charging accessory coming in 2018, which offers a generous active charging area that will allow iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X customers to simultaneously charge up to three devices, including Apple Watch Series 3 and a new optional wireless charging case for AirPods.

iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus come with iOS 11, featuring incredible advancements to Portrait mode, while new effects make Live Photos more fun and expressive.

iOS 11 also brings augmented reality to hundreds of millions of iOS devices with a new platform for developers to build apps that let users place virtual content on top of real-world scenes. Siri debuts new male and female voices and can translate US English phrases into Chinese, French, German, Italian or Spanish.