Both big media and bloggers agree that with the next iPhone release come this September, Apple is going to debut a brand new dock connector to replace the aging 30-pin thing present on existing devices. The company will allegedly deploy the new dock connector across all future iOS devices.
Built with space in mind, the new connector was originally said to have 19 pins or fewer. A new report surfaced today sporting a crisp shot of the new dock connector with a metal ring inside the casing cutout, suggesting an exciting possibility: that the cable could attach magnetically, just like the MagSafe connector for Apple’s notebooks…
NowhereElse, a French blog, has the story (human-translated from French):
One of the two other pictures we were sent in high resolution shows us that the new dock connector that should be on the iPhone 5 seems even smaller than what we thought, even tiny compared with the current dock connector.
This shot is the first to show a metal ring around the connecting dock integrated to the frame of the phone […]. Does this confirm the MagSafe dock connector?
The big question pertains to the number of pins this purported connector might have.
It was first reported that the new dock connector will carry 19 pins inside it, but that may not be the case after all.
iLounge was first to claim that Apple’s smaller dock connector may have fewer pins than originally thought. 9to5Mac followed up, digging through the fourth beta of iOS 6 to discover “9Pin” mentions that suggest something along the lines of a 9-pin connector.
What do you guys think, how many pins will the new connector have?
And is Apple going to market it as MagSafe?