"Merecik!" - Muat Naik Gambar 'H0t' Di Instagram, Adeline Pakai S3ks1 Sebab Tak Nampak Tua Dastan Much of the tech industry has gone into virus lockdown, but plans are still being laid for the big launches later in 2020. And it doesn't come much bigger than a new iPhone. In this article we look ahead to the iPhone 12, which was once firmly scheduled to launch in autumn 2020 - but Apple is now considering a delay which could push it back until 2021. We analyse the latest rumours concerning its release date, design, new features, tech specs and price, and help you make sense of all the speculation. A Swedish website has published attractive concept render illustrations (one of which is now the main picture on this article) that show the iPhone 12 Pro with a new design, larger screens, a LiDAR scanner like on the 2020 iPad Pro and a new blue colour finish. Finally, the iPhone 12's A4 processor chip has popped up in online speed benchmarks, and is outperforming the latest iPad Pro. When will the new iPhone come out? On balance we would still expect the next batch of iPhones to be announced in September 2020 (after all, every autumn since 2011 there has been at least one new model), but that is now very much in doubt. Sources familiar with the company report that Apple is currently holding internal discussions about a possible delay of several months, which could easily push the iPhone 12's release back into 2021. The culprit, as with so many delays and cancellations at the moment, is COVID-19. It played havoc with Apple's Asian supply chain in the early days of the outbreak - in February DigiTimes (via MacRumors) reported that Apple had been obliged to halt engineer visits to China for iPhone 12 development tests - and when the US started to see rising numbers of cases, Apple's headquarters was located in one of the more densely affected areas. The company's local public health body implemented a mandatory order against public gatherings as early as the start of March. We must stress that Apple has not yet reached a decision on this, and may not do so for some time; it will reportedly decide one way or the other by May at the latest. For more on the matter, read Apple may delay iPhone 12 launch 'until 2021'. Design changes Apple revamped the rear cameras on the 2019 handsets (with three lenses for the first time, and even the twin lenses of the iPhone 11 arranged in a new square housing), but left the rest of the design largely untouched for the third generation in a row. The full-screen/notch look of the iPhone X in 2017 was kept for the XS - although a new, larger Max screen option was added - and the 11 Pro. There's only so many times you can offer the same design and expect people to keep upgrading - although Apple has tested this theory at times in the past. Many Apple fans feels that, by rights, 2020 ought to be a year of significant design change, but they may have mixed feelings about the current rumours. Macotakara's sources in the supply chain state that the iPhone 12 will have the same casing as the iPhone 11 generation, with slightly more rounded edges. That's not too exciting, and goes against previous rumours that we'd be looking at a completely new design. But there could be more significant changes in other areas. Notch We could see the shrinking or total elimination of the notch, for example. The latter is probably more likely; the notch is an imperfect arrangement but it has become, perhaps accidentally, a signature part of the design, and we can't see Apple changing this until it's ready to remove it entirely. The notch contains a number of important sensors - those for Face ID, for example - and removing it would raise design problems, of course. Apple may go for a punch-hole design, which is a compromise of its own. But we feel that would be the worst of both worlds: an admission that the notch was a misstep, the loss of an iconic piece of design, and a failure, still, to actually provide a seamless all-screen design. For us, then, the decision to get rid of the notch is dependent on the technology to embed the sensors in the screen (since we can't imagine Apple going for a gimmicky-looking flip-round camera, a la ZenFone 6) becoming affordable at scale. That way your iPhone 12 would be nothing but screen - which is a tough ask, design-wise, but might justify the overused adjective "magical". Cameras PhoneArena has posted concept illustrations showing an iPhone with four camera lenses on the rear. This is madness, surely... Although it does fit the square housing rather neatly. (The flash is placed in the centre.) iPhone 12 (2020) release date, price & specs: PhoneArena concept illustration Screen size Our feeling is that Apple already offers too many screen sizes across its iPhone and iPad ranges. (Altogether now: 4.7in, 5.5in, 5.8in, 6.1in, 6.5in, 7.9in, 10.2in, 10.5in, 11in, 12.9in. Confusing, right?) However, it's rumoured that yet another size is about to be added to the portfolio: 5.4in. Max Rudberg, a Swedish graphic designer, has created a concept illustration of how this might look. And if it seems like an arbitrary number, it's not: he's taken a chassis roughly halfway between the iPhone 8 and the (much-missed) iPhone SE, given the result an iPhone X-style notch-screen layout, and ended up with a superbly pocketable device with a bigger screen than either. Honestly, based on the emails we read all the time from iPhone SE fans who feel abandoned by Apple, this would sell like mad. The Macotakara report linked above supports this, and adds that there will be a larger-screen option at the top as well. The site predicts that iPhones in 5.4in, 6.1in and 6.7in sizes will be launched in late 2020. The death of Lightning It's a recurrent rumour, but will 2020 be the year Apple finally gives in and replaces its proprietary Lightning port with USB-C, as it did on its iPad Pro models in 2018? In strategic terms we're inclined to think probably not, since that was a special case - fast data transfers to and from cameras being a requirement of many digital creatives. And owners of Lightning-based headphones and other accessories would be pretty ticked off. But Apple's hand may be forced. The EU has been flexing its muscles for some time, and in January proposed (and subsequently voted to expedite) a measure to force all mobile manufacturers to standardise around USB-C. As the Register observes, however, Apple has ignored such measures in the past and may do so again in the future. If we think in the longer term, Apple has given some thought to the idea of ditching the idea of physical charging ports altogether: a patent uncovered in February shows an iPhone with no Lightning port, no USB-C, and no buttons. But don't expect anything as radical as this to arrive in 2020. New iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Patent 20200057525 Colour options The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max come in silver, gold, Space Grey and Midnight Green colour finishes; the iPhone 11 is available in white, black, green, yellow, purple and red. That's a lot of choice, but what do we expect from the late-2020 generation? The plain iPhone 12 will follow the 11 in the main, but Apple will tweak the offering depending on which colours were most popular. The XR from the year before came in white, black, blue, yellow, coral (reddish-pink) and red, but Apple dropped blue and coral in 2019 and replaced them with purple and green. If one of those hasn't performed, it'll get dropped in turn. As for the iPhone 12 Pro handsets, we expect a new colour: navy blue. The leaker Max Weinbach has predicted (on the YouTube channel Everything Apple Pro) that this will replace Midnight Green - which we like, but provoked mixed reactions when it was announced. Here's what a navy blue iPhone 12 Pro could look like, in a mockup created by the site: iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Navy blue colour option Leaked photos, concept illustrations and videos We've already seen PhoneArena's mock-up of what the iPhone 12 would look like with four rear-facing camera lenses, and EverythingApplePro's mockup of a navy blue colour finish, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. In this section we will post the best iPhone 12 images and concept illustrations as they appear. The Swedish site Svetapple has posted a large number of attractive concept illustrations of the iPhone 12 Pro. Remember that these are not official leaks, but rather an artist's impression of what the device could look like. The most noteworthy aspects of Svetapple's renders are the new blue colour finish - although that has been rumoured before - and the inclusion of a LiDAR scanner, as on the 2020 iPad Pro. New iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Svetapple renders Here's a more detailed look at the specs and features expected to appear: New iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Svetapple render with specs Next we've got photos and video of a leaked prototype from within Apple's supply chain, posted by the Japanese blog Macotakara. The site claims it's a 3D mockup obtained from "Alibaba sources", although it cautions that the leak's credibility is unknown. New iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Macotakara 3D mockups You'll note that the iPhone 12 depicted here has a far more squared-off edge than the iPhone 11 Pro Max (which it's compared to in the righthand image above). This design brings the 12 closer to the 2018 iPad Pro. Most intriguingly, the site spotted a mysterious connector on one edge of the device: New iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: Mockup connector It looks like the magnetic connector that the iPad Pro 2018 uses to attach and charge the second-gen Apple Pencil, but as Macotakara points out, that particular stylus is too large to fit on a smartphone. It speculates about the possibility of a new, petite version of the Apple Pencil being released to suit the iPhone 12. Next is this concept video of the iPhone 12 Pro, from Concept Creator. It depicts the new handset with a slightly different arrangement of camera lenses on the rear, and assumes 5G will be included, although that obviously doesn't affect the external design. The German design studio Hasan Kaymak has created a concept video of the iPhone 12 Pro Max with an astonishing cluster of rear-facing camera lenses and sensors. It also ditches the notch and Torx screws - since apparently the display is stuck on to the frame - and adds a 45W charger and fast wireless charging. (It's easy to add features when you just have to decide what the device looks like, rather than actually manufacturing and shipping it.) New features A new iPhone needs a flagship feature - something an announcement event can be built around. In 2019 it was all about the cameras (triple lenses and night mode). In 2020 we think it will be 5G, if Apple can pull it off in time. 5G Android phone manufacturers have been widely offering 5G for some time - since before the iPhone 11 launched, in fact - but Apple is behind the curve in this department. Why the delay? The problem is getting someone to supply the modems. Apple used to partner with Qualcomm but the two firms had a major falling-out over patents; later a relationship was set up with Intel, but that company has since quit the 5G arena... and sold most of its smartphone modem business to Apple. So Apple could now make its own modems, but that won't be feasible until 2021. In the meantime, it's believed that deals with other suppliers (or with Qualcomm again, since legal matters have been resolved) are on track for a 5G launch in the second half of 2020. By which time, incidentally, Three will have finally started offering 5G and it will therefore be available to everyone in the UK... in theory, and depending on geography. The other potential reason for Apple's late entry to the 5G party could be that it wants to do the thing properly. There are multiple versions of the technology, and the one everyone really wants - referred to as millimetre wave, or mmWave - isn't widely available yet. Most people are offering a mid-band version of 5G, operating at sub-6GHz frequencies, and this is slower than mmWave (although still a lot faster than 4G). One analyst, Mehdi Hosseini of Susquehanna, has predicted that Apple will release the iPhone 12 with only mid-band 5G capabilities, then follow up with a mmWave-ready model a few months later - which sounds to us like a recipe for customer discontent. But Ming-Chi Kuo is reasonably confident that Apple will be ready for mmWave in time for the September 2020 launch. Indeed, he thinks that catering separately for mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G mean the company will actually announce four different handsets in September, the largest number of iPhones it has yet rolled out in a single launch. Keeping on the technical side of things, Kuo has warned that Apple's 5G-ready handsets probably won't offer 2×2 MIMO uplink as had previously been predicted, and rather than six amplifier they will have only one or two. This may only affect theoretical upload speeds, however, at least at launch: the carrier infrastructure is unlikely to support 2x2 immediately. 3D camera Before the late-2019 event, Bloomberg was predicting the imminent launch of an iPhone with a more powerful 3D camera, as part of Apple's continuing push into AR. This now seems likelier than ever. Current iPhones already feature 3D cameras, used for Face ID facial recognition, which makes it harder to market this as a breakthrough or flagship feature. But Bloomberg reckons that the 2020 version will be transformatively more powerful: it will have a range of around 15 feet, the site predicts, compared to just 25-50cm on the iPhone X series and 11. It will be used to scan the environment, whereas current 3D scanning is deployed on the user's face. Fast Company's source predicts that the next iPhones will feature ToF (time-of-flight) 3D cameras on the rear - which is to say, the 'world-facing' end - and this would be a significant step forward. This will enable improved augmented reality, a tech category that is rapidly turning into an Apple obsession, as well as photo/video effects that aren't currently possible, such as multi-layer bokeh. The same supplier will be used for this sensor array as for the front-facing 3D setup, according to Fast Company, and the site cautions that Apple may yet veto the inclusion for 2020. Touch ID This reintroduction of an old feature (one that's still offered on the 8 and 8 Plus, of course) would be new in the way it's applied - because to achieve it on the iPhone 12 Apple would need to embed the sensor somewhere other than in the Home button. The sensor could be embedded under the glass of the screen: we've known for years that this is possible, but it's not been logistically feasible to do so at scale and for a manageable price. By late 2020 we should have reached the point where that's no longer the case. Indeed the Chinese-language site Economic Daily News believes Apple will be ready to deploy an under-display fingerprint sensor in its late-2020 handsets, based on Qualcomm's ultrasonic scanning tech. Qualcomm already supplies this technology for use in Samsung phones, so the capabilities are there; but the site claims this will be a second-gen version that's faster and has a longer range. Patently Apple, meanwhile, has spotted a patent grant that would allow the company to place a fingerprint sensor under an OLED screen. A less exciting but potentially more practical option would be to embed the fingerprint sensor in the power/side button, a method which is currently used on Samsung's Galaxy S10e. Sure enough, in a late-January report Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted that Apple will launch a lower-cost iPhone with power-button Touch ID in the first half of 2021. This is an interesting prediction, particularly because it raises the uncomfortable idea of a cheaper product boasting a new feature that hasn't yet been made available to the flagship models... always a no-no. But it makes more sense if you assume that the top-end iPhone 12 will get under-screen Touch ID in autumn 2020, opening up space for the lower-end power button version the following year. Ultra-short range 802.11ay Wi-Fi Citing "sources familiar with the next iPhone 12", Macotakara says there is a possibility that the device will support IEEE 802.11ay, a new and extremely short-range wireless standard. The site says this would enable the next iPhone to offer "significantly improved" data transfer performance between devices - in other words, AirDrop could get a major bump in the next generation. This proposed update has been on the table for some time, having seen its earliest draft version in January 2017. The 802.11ay standard offers four times the bandwidth of 802.11ad and is based on the 60GHz band. Specs It's a little early to offer an accurate prediction of the iPhone 12's full specs list, but there are some things we can be reasonably sure of. A14 Bionic processor - the next iteration of Apple's proprietary system on a chip 4GB of RAM - most likely, although many rivals offer 6GB or even more 64/256/512GB - will Apple offer its first terabyte phone in 2020? We think not 5.8in/6.1in/6.5in Super Retina XDR display - the more expensive models at least will be OLED, and by 2020 Apple may extend this to all new models. We also hope for ProMotion displays Triple 12Mp rear-facing cameras A14 processor We'll start to expand our coverage of each of the above specs as we get closer to the launch, but let's start with a little more about the A14 chip, which appears to be cropping up in some online benchmark tools. If these benchmarks are what they seem to be, the A14 is going to be crazy fast. Take a look at the following screengrab from the popular benchmark Geekbench, posted by AppleInsider. It compares the score for an iPad Pro 12.9in from 2018 - one of the most powerful mobile devices Apple has ever released - with what appears to be a prototype iPhone 12. And the iPhone 12 is scoring higher, even in multi-core. iPhone 12 release date, price & specs: A14 chip benchmark The 'A14' is clocked above 3GHz - the first of Apple's A-family chips to achieve this - and despite having fewer cores than the A12X (6 rather than 8) it rates higher throughout the CPU tests. How likely is this to be genuine? Reasonably so. Prototype devices have been spotted in online test suites before previous Apple launches, which makes sense; by this point in the release schedule the company will undoubtedly have created and be testing in-house samples of the iPhone 12. Price The iPhone 12 is likely to start at around £700/$700. Here's the pricing on the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, as of 3 February 2020: iPhone 11 Pro Max: from £1,149/$1,099 iPhone 11 Pro: from £1,049/$999 iPhone 11: from £729/$699 Apple has been ramping up its phone prices for a while now, particularly in the UK, and we're hopeful it can stabilise things for the late-2020 launches. Further reading That's all the iPhone 12 rumours for now. If you'd like to know more about Apple's plans for the year, read our guide to the new Apple products expected in 2020. Those who are interested in the current smartphone lineup should instead focus on our iPhone buying guide, or our roundup of the best iPhone deals. Related Posts