Apple is using an office in Israel to develop hardware for the
"iPhone 8," which is expected to be released next year with a radical
redesign, according to an employee at the site.
Details on the iPhone 8 are scarce, but some reports, including this one from MacRumours,
suggest that it will have an edge-to-edge display that removes the need
for the top and bottom bezels where features like the fingerprint
sensor and the front-facing camera are located.
Some hardware for the iPhone 8 is being created in Herzliya, Israel,
according to a local Apple employee, who said employees in Israel work
on all of Apple's new products.
The employee, whose identity is being concealed by Business Insider,
solders components for Apple. This person didn't give too much away
about the new handset but said it would be "different" from the iPhone
6s and the iPhone 7, which have been criticised for being too similar to
their predecessors.
Speaking with Business Insider outside Apple's Herzliya office at
Maskit Street 12, the Apple employee said employees in Israel were
working on what's coming "next" in Apple's product line, giving a
specific mention to the iPhone 8.
The worker used the term "iPhone 8" unprompted in our conversation.
That was interesting because the next logical name for the iPhone to be
released in 2017 should be "iPhone 7s." The iPhone 8 isn't due until
2018, as Apple has a two-year development cycle for new iPhones. Some
observers have noted, however, that the iPhone 7 was a largely
incremental update. S-series iPhones are also supposed to be
incremental updates, but the phone that is coming in the 2017 "iPhone
7s" slot is expected to be a much more dramatic improvement to the line.
So some people believe that Apple might break its naming tradition in 2017, skip iPhone 7s, and give the iPhone a new number or name out of step with the current sequence. "iPhone 8" would be one option.
The source added that the iPhone 8 would have a better camera than
that of the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 7 — something that is fairly
standard when a new iPhone enters the market.
The employee was informed at the start of the conversation that they
were talking to a journalist. When asked what Apple uses the Herzliya
facility for, the source (who spoke only broken English) said "new
products." The person added that Apple didn't actually assemble products
in Israel.
A second Apple employee whom Business Insider spoke with in Herzliya
said they "couldn't talk" about what Apple did in Herzliya, while an
employee from the networking giant Cisco, which also has an office in
the area, said: "I have three friends that work there. They work on the
hardware side. Verifications. Something like that."
An Apple security guard told Business Insider we could not speak with anyone inside Apple's office without an invitation.
There are about 800 employees at Apple's Herzliya office, which is
about four years old and situated approximately 15 kilometers north of
Tel Aviv's city centre. The office was set up after Apple acquired two
startups: the flash memory designer Anobit in 2012 and the 3D sensor developer PrimeSense in 2013. Apple has since acquired the Israeli camera firm LinX.
Sources close to Apple said the company used the
research-and-development facility in Herzliya to develop hardware such
as chips, storage, cameras, and wireless technologies. Apple CEO Tim
Cook said during a trip to Israel in 2015 that the Herzliya office was
Apple's second-largest R&D facility in the world, according to The Times of Israel.
The Cupertino, California-headquartered firm also has an office in
Haifa in the north of Israel that is home to about 200 employees.
Avi Hasson, the chief scientist of the Ministry of Economy of the
State of Israel, told Business Insider on Monday that almost every major
Silicon Valley tech firm had an outpost in Israel, adding that the
country was a "fountain of innovation."
An Apple representative said the company did not comment on rumour or speculation.
