Next iPhone could be even thinner and lighter thanks to smaller LED backlighting chips

In its never-ending quest of engineering ever thinner and lighter devices, Apple is said to use smaller LED backlighting chips that could, at least theoretically, make the next iPhone(s)—you guessed right— smaller and lighter.

Citing a TrendForce report, DigiTimes said Tuesday that next-generation ‘iPhone 6s’ and ‘iPhone 6s Plus’ will adopt smaller LED chips for the display’s backlight unit. The new chips reportedly measure three mm wide, 0.85mm tall and 0.4mm deep versus the 3.0mm x 0.85mm x 0.6mm chips used in the present-generation iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices.

Japan-based Nichia and Toyoda Gose will allegedly supply these LED backlight chips for the upcoming iPhones.

“As such 0.4t LED chips are smaller with brightness ten percent lower than 0.6t ones, the backlight unit may need to use 2-3 more chips to reach the same total brightness,” reads the report.

I’m not entirely convinced that the next iPhones will have a slimmer chassis.

Apple typically re-uses chassis design across two iPhone generations before making major changes to the handset’s form factor.

I’m not an engineer, but conventional wisdom tells me Apple could use any extra space inside the device for other components such as new sensors or bigger batteries.

As per usual, anything written by DigiTimes should be taken with a few pinches of salt considering this Taiwanese trade publication has hit-and-miss track record, at best.

The 4.7-inch iPhone 6s and new 5.5-inch iPhone 6s Plus should enter production in June 2015. An estimated 24 million units should be initially shipped in the third quarter.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks both devices will be announced in August before hitting store shelves in September thanks to better-than-expected yields.

According to the revered analyst, these new iPhones will be outfitted with Sony’s twelve-megapixel CMOS sensor with RGBW subpixels, a faster A9 chip with 2GB of higher-clocked LPDDR4 RAM, pressure-sensing Force Touch technology and more.

A rose color option possibly resembling the look of the 18-karat rose gold Apple Watch Edition is expected to be added to this year’s iPhone lineup, too.

Source: DigiTimes