New iPhone to Get a Snappy Performance Upgrade

With WWDC09 now just weeks away, rumors and predictions regarding what Apple may reveal at the highly-anticipated, sold-out developers conference in San Francisco are sure to spread like a California wildfire.

Anyone interested in being on the right side of such talk would do well to consider the logic and analysis out Thursday from John Gruber, the well-placed author of the blog Daring Fireball, who isn’t prone to talking about things he doesn’t know a little something about.

Citing “information from informed sources,” Gruber believes the processor in the next-generation iPhone is going to be the kind of upgrade to make people crowd around and go, “ooooh!” He looks for Apple’s processing secret-sauce to better the speed of current iPhones by 1.5 times, similar to the bump in performance experienced when Mac users got hands on machines with the first batch of PowerPCs, or PC users moved from 486 to Pentium machines.

Follow after the jump for more of what Gruber expects and how likely his expectations are to be met.

Aside from a faster processor which will make the next iPhone smoother and snappier switching between apps and loading web pages, Gruber expects the device’s RAM will increase from 128k to 256k; and with computers, more RAM is always a good thing.

Other items of note:

• storage will go from 8GB/16GB to 16GB/32GB. Lending credence to this notion is a 32GB placeholder that has just appeared on T-Mobile’s Austrian website; a similar placeholder last year correctly foretold the arrival of the iPhone 3G.
• industrial design that differs from the current 3G model in only very subtle ways - the case industry should not have to retool just yet.
• the phone’s camera ought to be getting an auto-focus lens and video capability, taking advantage of the video editing capabilities already built-in to the iPhone 3.0 operating software.
• US pricing on the new models, Gruber expects, will be the same $199/$299 cell provider-subsidized cost, and he imagines existing sock of iPhone 3G models will then be sold at discounts through the Apple web site.

  Be sure to read Gruber’s piece for more on his thoughts about the “in-the-works tablet-thingamajig” and the possibility of an “iPhone minni.”

  This article is copyright Cultomedia Corp.