Two fairly major components to be used in Apple’s next iPhone – widely thought to be the iPhone 5S – have popped up online, and they appear to connect together, which certainly helps to prove their authenticity.
Firstly we have the screen, which can quite easily be recognised as being the same size and shape as the current iPhone 5 – that’s a 4-inch Retina display. There’s a black bezel, space for the usual round home button at the bottom and a flex cable at the top to connect the display to the iPhone’s logic board. Of course, this could just be an iPhone 5 component, but a redesigned iPhone logic board has also appeared and that flex cable from the top of the screen part seems to connect nicely to it.
From the images it seems that Apple has relocated the two connectors on the screen’s flex cable to be perpendicular to each other, rather than one stacked horizontally on top of the other. These connections match up on the leaked logic board, pictured above on the left.
Unfortunately the pictured logic board doesn’t contain whichever processor Apple intends to use in its new iPhone, although it does appear that the space left for it is bigger than that of the iPhone 5’s logic board. Rumours suggest that a new Apple-made A7 chip will be used to boost speed and graphics performance – a typical trait of Apple’s ‘S’ upgrades.
Despite talk of a cheaper, plastic iPhone and even a larger iPhone, it seems that the iPhone 5S is almost a dead cert to launch later this year. As has become tradition, the 5S will keep the same cosmetic appearance and screen size, with the main changes being under the hood.
Whether the iPhone 5S will be joined by a cheaper iPhone offering remains to be seen, but we should find out around September time when Apple sends out the invites to its annual event.