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Fun Rumour: Is This The New Apple iPhone 5S?

This article is more than 10 years old.

I wouldn't say I am wholly convinced by this particular little rumour, a possible sighting of Apple's next phone. What is being called, but probably won't be if it is released, the iPhone 5S. Via a French site the Mail has pictures which may or may not be that next model.

From the outside it looks very like an iPhone 5. But some of the internals, and some of the connections, seem to be in different places. As the paper says, whether this is actually a new Apple product of just a decent clone is unknown:

These pictures purport to show the case for the forthcoming iPhone 5S, Apple's next update of its market leading smartphone.

Surfacing on French website Nowhereelse.fr, the images reveal an exterior virtual identical to the current iPhone 5, which was only released in September.

But a closer look at the inside of the part shows the fixing points of some of the internal components - which differ from the latest model - seems to suggest that it could be a new part for an updated phone.

Nowhereelse.fr hedge its bets, admitting that while it could be a case from a new iPhone prototype, it could equally be part of a well-made Chinese iPhone clone.

We also get a repeat of the DigiTimes report from last month about how this new phone was going into trial production.

Apple is expected to begin trial production of a new version of its iPhone 5, or iPhone 5S, in December with initial production volumes likely to top 50,000-100,000 units, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

My own supposition (not backed up by any hard evidence, this is pure speculation) is that this rumoured 5S isn't going to come as soon as we might have thought 6 weeks or two months ago. For back then we were hearing stories of low construction yield on the iPhone 5. And I thought that this might mean that a newer design would be released to deal with the design problems that led to that manufacturing problem (specifically, the scratching of the anodised aluminium case). If they've solved that problem then the imperative of a new device which deals with it has gone.

But of course all of this is indeed speculation. We're near 100% certain that there will be another generation of the iPhone. But when and what it will be is all purely a matter of rumour at present.