The iPhone 8 will all-screen OLED panel will not come out until December 2012 despite reports that OLED mass production will commence next month. In a new note, reputed Apple watcher Ming-chi Kuo predicted that wholesale assembly of the device will only ramp up between October and November "due to increased production difficulty."
MacRumors obtained Kuo's latest report, in which the analyst said the next iPhone - the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 7S series - will be announced as scheduled around September this year but only the latter will be immediately available. The more premium model, said to unbox with radical redesign and more powerful specifications, will only begin shipping in late November or more realistically in December.
Kuo said Apple is unlikely to provide sufficient number of units to meet the expected heavy demand for the iPhone 8, which reports said will retail for more than $1000.
"Severe supply shortages may persist for a while after the new models are launched, capping total shipments of new iPhones in 2H17," the analyst wrote on his latest note. From a high of 110 million freshly-minted new iPhones that Kuo has previously forecasted that will ship out in the last quarter of 2017, the chance is high that Apple can only deliver 90 million units, tops.
The delay is mostly caused by the numerous upgrades that will jump out of the box with the iPhone 8, all of which will make use of intricate technology that Apple will want to implement with perfection. MacRumors identified these feature upgrades as the following: "customized OLED panel, new 10-nanometer A11 processor, all-new 3D Touch module, substrate-like printed circuit board and 3D sensing."
Kuo is convinced that delayed shipments will mar the iPhone 8 release as he underscored in his note that "we see a higher probability of the worst case scenario coming to pass."
The KGI report likewise indicated that Apple will see a weak shipping momentum in the last quarter of 2017, no thanks to the less appealing iPhone 7S series that is without the all-screen design language and OLED panel.
However, the purported iPhone 8 production delays and subsequent supply shortages were termed by WCCFTech as "grossly exaggerated." The report pointed to a UBI Research report that claimed OLED manufacturing for the iPhone 8 release will begin this coming May.