This might be our first look at Apple's real iPhone 14 design
Remember how the iPhone 14 was allegedly leaked before the iPhone 13 family even went official back in September 2021? Well, you may want to forget all about that "futuristic" Apple design with a centered hole punch and iPhone 4-inspired circular side buttons, as the Cupertino-based tech giant is once again expected to play things safe this fall.
Hot on the heels of credible-looking schematics purporting to show a 6.1-inch iPhone 14 Pro with both a pill-shaped and a smaller round display cutout, the "standard" version of Apple's "next big thing" stars in a somewhat sketchy (literally) new leak of its own revealing an extremely familiar appearance.
The notch is dead, long live the notch!
Otherwise put, the unnecessarily large screen cutout used to accommodate the front-facing camera and Face ID authentication system since 2017's iPhone X is dead as far as "Pro" iOS handsets are concerned but very much alive in terms of non-Pro (and non-SE) iPhones.
That is, of course, if these freshly revealed CAD (Computer-Aided Design) renders will ultimately prove to be the real deal, which is never a guarantee with so many months still left to Apple's next major product launch event.
The new images don't exactly come as a shock amid intensifying speculation of another (oddly) "safe" play from Apple, which might equip the 6.1-inch iPhone 14 and 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Max with a good old fashioned A15 Bionic chip instead of the A16 expected to power the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max.
By the way, the non-Pro iPhone 14 Max, which could step in to essentially replace the unsuccessful iPhone 13 mini, is likely to look very similar to the "vanilla" iPhone 14, sporting a wide notch of its own and a dual rear-facing camera setup.
The devil is in the details
...But the details are also largely unchanged. Sorry if you were expecting us to wax poetic about some subtle revisions or alterations to the buttons, ports, and other seemingly minor design elements that could radically change the overall look or feel of this thing, but at least for the time being, we don't have much to report on that front.
The Lightning connector is almost certainly not going anywhere this year either, crushing both our USB Type-C and portless dreams all at once, and the headphone jack is (obviously) not coming back from the dead. The physical volume control keys, alert slider, SIM card slot, and power button are all in their familiar positions, with their same old designs and no notable additions or absences.
For what it's worth, MySmartPrice reports that the protruding rear camera module "seems" to have thicker glass around it, which sounds like the kind of minor build improvement that you should never take for granted when depicted in images like these half a year ahead of a phone's official announcement.
Then again, it's probably wise not to be 100 percent sure of anything at the moment in relation to the iPhone 14. That includes everything from the unchanged dual 12MP rear-facing imaging sensors repeatedly tipped in contrast with the 48MP primary shooter of the 14 Pro and Pro Max to an enhanced but still far from impressive 6GB RAM count.
The satellite capabilities initially rumored to debut with the iPhone 13 lineup are also not etched in stone for 2022, and while the 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED screen is unlikely to get a size or resolution boost, its brightness could well be vastly improved with the help of arch-rival and valued partner Samsung. Let's just hope that there are also other meaningful non-Pro upgrades in the pipeline.
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