Some of the most credible "iPhone 8" speculation this past month has been centered on the price.
Credible because it's Apple, which is hardly bashful about selling high-priced products. (The most recent example being the Touch Bar MacBook Pro that starts at a heart-stopping $1,799.) And credible because it appears -- at this stage at least -- that the first OLED iPhone will be loaded with new tech and have limited availability initially.
So, a $1,000 OLED iPhone is perfectly plausible. Apple, of course, will have to come up with premium branding to justify the price. To wit, Japanese-language Website Macotakara (courtesy of MacRumors) may have a plausible theory: the "iPhone Edition." Like the pricey Apple Watch Edition that starts at $1,249.
Analysts are thinking along those lines too. "Apple will...have 'one more thing' this year with a 10th-anniversary design OLED iPhone which will be offered as a limited edition product but going into 2018 we expect Apple to fulfill larger volumes of the new designs," IHS Markit analyst Wayne Lam told me on Friday.
"Apple will likely set the OLED iPhone 8 price as high as possible for the limited quantity of OLED displays that they will be able to get from Samsung Display," display expert Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, told me recently in an email.
For consumers squeamish about paying top dollar for the latest and greatest iPhone, Apple will also have the more conventional iPhone 7s and 7s Plus, as pointed out by numerous reports, including Macotakara and IHS analyst Lam.
Other interesting tidbits pointed out by Macotakara include Apple testing various prototypes "with or without home button" and models with a glass, aluminum, or white ceramics chassis.
So, the way pricing seems to be shaping up is a more conventionally priced iPhone 7S and 7S Plus with an IPS LCD screen and then the limited edition OLED iPhone.
I'm betting millions of consumer won't hesitate to snap up a $1,000-and-up iPhone.
