Here is an interesting story to wrap up the weekend: Business Insider is reporting that Apple scrapped its iPhone 5 featuring a major redesign some three months before it was to have been announced. The revelation comes from a source that “has been right about future Apple products in the past” but the publication still suggests that you take the report with “with a nice fat dose of salt.”
Business Insider‘s source apparently spent about two weeks with a prototype and confirmed a number of rumoured details. This next generation iPhone did sport a larger 4-inch display, a much faster prototype (with matching poor battery life though), a new virtual home button, a 10MP camera, an aluminium back (like the iPads and earlier generation iPhones), and a flatter design. The prototype had a “messed up color profile,” something that Apple might have done to hide the true improvements it had made for the display. The prototype also ran Siri although it was called “Assistant” at the time.
One interpretation of the ‘teardrop design’
Apple is also looking to eventually use its “liquid metal” technology to make colored iPhones. Rather than the paint being applied to the surface, it would be part of the metal. If the metal was scratched, the colour would remain.
So why did Apple kill this model? It turns out that Steve Jobs was apparently not happy with how the larger display “fragmented” the iPhone space. Jobs was keen to avoid the fragmentation he saw with Android and he saw maybe saw in this prototype the start of something similar.
With the growing demand for larger displays on smartphones, I have a feeling that a larger display iPhone will make an appearance sooner than later. Keeping a single 3.5-inch design may jeopardize Apple’s future growth in the smartphone space.
If nothing else, it is certainly an interesting theory.