With its August/September
release date fast approaching, the usual bevy of iPhone 6 design and
hardware leaks are flowing thick and fast. With the pressure on Apple to
innovate in the mobile space, and Android (and Samsung) continuing to
steal away market share, the iPhone 6 will need to be seriously
impressive on multiple fronts — which could be difficult, considering
this may be the first iPhone designed without help from Steve Jobs. As
usual, there’s an utterly insane number of iPhone 6 hardware and design
rumors, spanning everything from multiple screen sizes (up to 5.5
inches!) to close integration with an upcoming (and still unannounced)
iWatch smartwatch.
Read on for our iPhone 6 hardware leak and
rumor round-up. We’ll do our best to point out which leaks and rumors
are most likely to be true, and which are probably just wishful
thinking.
iPhone 6 concept render, next to an iPhone 5S. The render was made by Martin Hajek, based on the various rumors and leaked cases. The image at the top of the story is from Hajek as well.
iPhone 6 design
Like
last year, there are again insistent rumors that there will be more
than one iPhone 6. This time, instead of a cheaper model, hardware leaks
suggest that we could be in for a couple of iPhones with different
screen sizes (4.7 and 5.5 inches to be exact). Other leaks suggest that
these new iPhones could be very thin, too — perhaps as thin as 6mm.
(Will the iPhone 6 be called the iPhone Air? Who knows.)
iPhone 6 dummies, in a range of colors
One
leaked photo, pictured above, appears to show some iPhone 6 design
dummies. It’s generally unwise to infer too much from early prototypes
like these, but it does suggest that the iPhone 6 will be larger (4.7
inches) than the iPhone 5S, have a more rounded design, and come in the
same three colors (champagne, silver, and space gray).
Will the iPhone 6 have a curved display? [Image credit: Sonny Dickson]
There was also another dummy design with a curved display,
but again, we shouldn’t read too much into these dummy designs. Still,
if we can draw one correlation between all of these dummies, is that
they’re mostly much larger. It seems fairly likely that there will be at
least one iPhone 6 with a larger, ~4.7-inch screen.
When it
comes to the iPhone 6′s construction and materials, aluminium — like the
iPhone 5S — seems likely, again with some kind of different
material/texture at the top and bottom. We also expect sapphire glass to play a role in the iPhone 6
— though the latest estimates suggest that sapphire glass is still a
bit too expensive to cover the entire front of an iPhone. There’ll be
the usual sapphire glass camera cover and fingerprint sensor, at least.
iPhone 6 hardware specs
As
far as hardware specs go, we don’t know a whole lot about the iPhone 6.
If there is indeed a 4.7- or 5.5-inch screen, the display will probably
pack more than the 1136×640 resolution found in the iPhone 5S. Stepping
up to 1920×1080 would be the most likely resolution, but Apple might go
for something crazy — like 2560×1440 — to retake the Retina
resolution/PPI crown.
The fingerprint sensor will still be there,
of course. I doubt the underlying hardware will change much (it’s
already far superior to other sensor designs, like the one found on the Galaxy S5). We will probably see some changes on the software side of the equation, in iOS 8 (but more on that later).
There
will almost certainly be a new A8 SoC in the iPhone 6, but there’s no
hard data on what specs the chip might have. Both the A6 and A7 were big
departures from previous Apple SoCs, but I’d be surprised if the A8
continued that trend. As we’ve covered previously, the A7 is a beast of a chip,
with a lot of performance gains to be realized by turning the clock
speed up. In Intel chip release parlance, I’d expect the A8 to be more
of a “tick” than a microarchitectural overhaul “tock.” I’d expect the
iPhone 6′s CPU to be clocked at around 1.5GHz, and perhaps to feature a
new or tweaked GPU, but otherwise it’ll be mostly unchanged.
Finally,
the camera: The iPhone 6 will almost certainly have a new, advanced
camera — but the rumors don’t seem to agree on what form that camera
might take. Apple recently hired Nokia’s camera engineer Ari Partinen,
but that’s more likely to have an affect on the iPhone 6S or 7. Apple
received an optical image stabilization (OIS) patent, and it’s about
time that the iPhone gained OIS (Nokia and HTC have had OIS tech for a
while now). You can count on there being a bigger or better imaging
sensor, too — not necessarily more megapixels, but bigger and better pixels.
iOS 8 Healthbook app [Image credit: 9to5Mac]
iPhone 6 software specs
The
iPhone 6 will almost certainly be released with iOS 8, which itself
will almost certainly be unveiled at WWDC at the beginning of June.
Where iOS 7 featured a massive design overhaul, iOS 8 is expected to
return us to Apple’s usual
modus operandi of gradual evolution.
The biggest addition is expected to be a new app called Healthbook,
which is all about collating data from a variety of sensors — on the
phone, but also presumably from external devices like fitness bands and
smartwatches — to help you track your health and fitness. If there is an
iWatch in the offing, expect it to integrate tightly with Healthbook.
Apple’s
Maps app is also expected to receive some love, including clearer
labels and the addition of public transit directions. Following its
acquisition of Beats, something may occur on the music front as well.
Overall,
then, the biggest change you can expect with the iPhone 6 is a larger
screen — but even then, given how resistant Apple has been to increasing
screen size, I still wouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 6 debuted with
a normal 4-inch screen. It’s not unusual for a hardware company to try
out dozens of prototypes before settling on a final design. These leaked
images could easily be of early prototypes that Apple has since
dismissed.
But then again, the market clearly wants large-screen
devices, and unless Apple has something groundbreaking to release — like
an entirely new product — then pandering to the market with a
larger-screen iPhone is probably a good idea. Just as Apple trialed a
“cheaper” device with the iPhone 5C, the company could quite easily
release two versions of the iPhone 6 — one with a 4-inch screen, and one
with a larger screen. (I don’t buy the rumors that Apple will release
two large-screen iPhones.)
Another iPhone 5S vs. iPhone 6 (concept) image
Apple
usually unveils its new iPhones at a special event in September, but
there’s a rumor that it might move that forward to August this year. In
either case, we’ll know more once WWDC rolls around and we comb through
iOS 8 looking for iPhone-related strings and variables — and then, after
that, it should only be a couple of months until we see the iPhone 6 in
the flesh. Depending on how you interpret the scripture, the iPhone 6
might also be the first iPhone designed without input from Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.
He was apparently working on the “next two iPhones” prior to his death
just after the iPhone 4S was announced. Whether that means the 5 and 5S,
or the iPhone 5 and 6, we’ll probably never know.
