Purported photos of new iPhone 5 | Hacker News Reader

Purported photos of new iPhone 5

9to5mac.com

18 pointsmikecane13 comments

I find it hard to believe they'll take a step back in the design with that metal/glass back. Although I guess it would be their way of admitting an all-glass back was a bad idea. I'm still hoping they'll manage to fit the larger screen into the same overall size as the 4s (though still thinner). These longer bodies seem lazy.

Actually, the back of this design is much closer to an early iPhone prototype that was recently uncovered in some court proceedings. [1] Looks like they've ditched the extruded enclosure, but maybe the segmented back plate lives on. [2]

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3191793/apple-iphone-proto...

[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/the-original-iphone-4-d...

I find it more likely this is a functional constraint. The "panel" at the top is likely where the antennas live which needed a non-metallic material to avoid blocking reception. After the "external" antenna debacle I doubt they would want to repeat that mistake.

I don't think they have ditched the idea. You can still see those molded in separators around the sides. I am on a good carrier, so I have never had problems with the 4 antenna design, even though I can get the bars to go down by "holding it wrong".

I like the idea of the body serving the roles of the case, the antenna and providing structural support. So hopefully this is version 3 which fixes all the problems they had.

Possible, although there is also NFC now added to the RF mix, not sure if it can share an antenna or not.

Yeah, I was coming back to this thread to mention this. The antenna around the outside works fine, so the back could be entirely metal, no glass needed. Very bizarre design.

I dislike how the camera is not vertically centered inside of that black strip on the back.

That was exactly my first thought, too. Seems strange from a company that is so design centered. The fact that it violates the aesthetic sense of an engineer is probably a bad sign.

Or there are hardware considerations that make it impossible to have it somewhere else?

They probably want the best camera possible for a given thickness so that the surfaces are still flat. Probably easiest to fence off one corner.

Having it be centered would make it very difficult to take pictures in a horizontal orientation without your fingers covering the lens.

Vertically centered, not horizontally centered.

Seems like a weak jump, visually, from the previous generation. Screen is definitely lengthened and there are obvious differences on the dock, but Apple is usually much bolder in design changes for a new product.

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