Judging by the growing number of part leaks coming our way, production of Apple’s iPhone 6 should be moving full steam ahead. Coming straight out of China from a pretty reliable source, past two weeks have brought us purported iPhone 6 back cover parts, as well as the inner shell.
Now the same source has posted additional shots depicting what appears to be a front as well as back iPhone part, photographed next to an iPhone 5s for a nice design comparison…
Pictured top of post: the front part comparison.
Notice the skinnier side bezels relative to the iPhone 5/5s and the smaller top/bottom surface due to the 4.-7 inch screen taking up more space.
Moreover, the hole for the front-facing camera appears to be bigger, possibly indicating a much improved FaceTime camera for crisper selfies.
The device doesn’t appear oversized pictured next to the current four-inch iPhone 5/5s so who knows, the design solutions might allow for one-handed use.
Right below: the back part.
The shots were posted on Chinese micro-blogging service Weibo by user DreamerJimmy. The same guy has been right on the money with genuine part leaks ahead of the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c launches, by the way.
Your key takeaway should be that these latest images seemingly corroborate much of the previous leaks.
Provided the photos are genuine and not representative of someone’s vision of what the iPhone 6 should look like (or an abandoned prototype), the iPhone 6 will have a more accentuated two-tone design compared to the iPhone 5/5s.
More images of the assumed aluminum chassis come via the French blog NowhereElse.fr [Google translate]. As seen below, the photographs appear to depict a back part much resembling Apple’s existing unibody design for the iPhone 5/5s chassis, with most of the holes and inlays in the right places.
We can again see the circular camera flash hole as opposed to the current pill-shaped opening for Apple’s Tru-Tone flash on the iPhone 5s.
Either Apple’s engineers have found a way to combine the two flashes on the iPhone 5s into one module or the iPhone 6 reverts back to a single-flash design, which I find hard to believe.
At any rate, these images – provided they’re genuine, of course, do seem to indicate that production of iPhone 6 unibody enclosures is now running at full speed, ahead of the purported September launch.
Chinese media (via GForGames) reported yesterday that Apple’s suppliers have already started churning out printed circuit boards (PCB), with about a hundred million units planned for both iPhone variants.
Next month, Apple’s contract manufacturers are thought to start assembling components, with Japan’s Ibiden, Austria’s AT&S, California’s TTM Technologies and Taiwan’s Compeq all identified as the iPhone 6 PCB suppliers.
The same report claims that the aforementioned any-layer PCB suppliers are on a tight schedule because of the “huge amount of units” ordered by Apple.
We still can’t tell for sure whether or not the two new iPhone models will launch simultaneously, mirroring last year’s double-iPhone (5s/5c) launch.
Last we heard, Apple has apparently solved production issues regarding thin batteries and display panels for the bigger 5.5-inch model so there’s some hope that the device could go on sale in September alongside its 4.7-inch counterpart, albeit in limited quantities.