Apple may be experimenting with notch-less designs for its iPod touch family of media players, which were last refreshed in July 2015, based on a new glyph discovered in the iOS 12.2 code.
UPDATE: According to Brazilian iOS developer and 9to5Mac author Guilherme Rambo, the icon is fake. “I’ve just been able to confirm that there is no such icon on iOS. If there were, I would’ve found it before,” he wrote on Twitter today.
Unearthed from iOS 12.2 beta 4, which released four days ago, and published online by Jonathan Mitchell, the icon seems to hint that the company’s unreleased seventh-generation iPod touch might borrow a fullscreen design without the Home button from the latest iPhones.
This was first reported on by MacRumors.
As you can see for yourself, the icon is labeled “HLSipod2” and depicts what resembles an iPod touch with no Home button. There’s no notch for the TrueDepth camera neither, suggesting that the next revision to the media player may not include Touch ID nor Face ID at all.
That would jive nicely with recent findings by iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith who found references to an iPod touch without Touch ID or Face ID in an earlier iOS 12.2 beta.
You should not take the icon for granted, however, because it could very well be work in progress or just a placeholder for the real glyph in the shipping version of iOS 12.2. Case in point: In September 2017, strings unearthed from the iOS 11 GM code strongly pointed to a Face ID-enabled iPod touch but those references were in there simply for future-proofing.
TUTORIAL: How to turn an iPod touch into an iPhone
Macotakara first reported in mid-January that Apple would release a successor to the current sixth-generation iPod touch as a gateway of sorts to Apple Music and other services.
A month later, reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo corroborated the Mac Otakara story by confirming with his supply chain sources that the next iPod touch with a faster Apple-designed chip was in the works. He did not mention a possible redesign for the device.
We reviewed the current iPod touch three years ago, calling it a capable, inexpensive App Store machine priced at $199 for the 32GB version. As whispers of the next model began circulating online, we revisited our original review to see if the media player is still worth it in 2019.
Should Apple refresh or kill the iPod touch line?
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