Leaks and rumors surrounding Apple’s unreleased iPhones follow the same cycle each and every year. With the iPhone 12, we’re now at a pretty exciting point in that cycle. First, early details leak about a year before a new iPhone’s debut, and these details come from insiders who have connections within Apple’s component supply chain. For the most part, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is the source of information at this early stage, and he has a fantastic track record. After that, more details about the next-generation iPhone’s design and features continue to trickle out until the actual designs are rendered based on CAD files that are inevitably stolen from Foxconn, the factory where Apple’s iPhones are assembled. Things snowball from there, but we haven’t quite gotten that far in the iPhone 12 cycle yet.
We know what the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro models are going to look like for the most part, thanks to descriptions shared by Kuo. He has covered most of the bases at this point the research notes that he sends to clients, but we still haven’t actually seen Apple’s new iPhone 12 design leak. That leaves graphic designs to dream up designs based on Kuo’s descriptions, and we’ve seen some iPhone 12 concepts that will likely end up being pretty close to the real iPhone 12 series that Apple unveils this coming September. There’s a new imagining of Apple’s iPhone 12 that just appeared in a video on YouTube though, and I can’t stop staring at it.
Before we get to this new iPhone 12 design video, I should point out that there are two reasons I can’t stop staring at this sleek new iPhone 12 concept… and the first reason is that it’s absolutely ridiculous. The back of the phone is all wrong because the camera array looks more like a Samsung phone than an iPhone. We already know that the iPhone 12 will feature a triple-lens or quad-lens camera array that looks a lot like the one currently on the iPhone 11 series, so we have no idea why graphic designer Hasan Kaymak decided to change things up.
But that’s not the worst part.
Every so often, the graphic designers who make these videos decide to get a bit too creative and dream up ridiculous smartphone features that have no chance of ever being real. The stupidest thing I’ve ever seen was an invisibility mode that uses an all-screen, wrap-around design and rear camera to make an iPhone concept look like it’s invisible. Why do I bring that up? Well, because the new feature in this video is the second stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
You know those laser keyboards you can get for $40 on Amazon that project a keyboard onto your desk that you can actually type on? This iPhone 12 concept pairs technology like that with another projector to create the most unrealistic desktop computing mode you’ll ever see. It’s terrible and we have no idea why Kaymak would do it. Once you get past that, however, you’re left with an iPhone 12 that looks absolutely stunning.
The verdict is still out on what Apple plans to do with the notch in 2020. Kuo says it’ll still be there to house the TrueDepth camera components Apple needs for its Face ID system, though it’ll be a bit smaller than the current notch on the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro series. Other reports suggest that the iPhone 12 phones might have uniform bezels all around the screen, and that new smaller TrueDepth sensors will be hidden inside the bezels. That’s the dream, of course, and we can see quite clearly that an iPhone 12 with a true all-screen design would be absolutely breathtaking.
We know from Kuo’s reporting that the iPhone 12 will feature a big design refresh that we’re very much looking forward to. According to the analyst, it will feature a design that modernizes the iPhone 5, with flat metal edges around the perimeter of the phone instead of rounded edges like the iPhone 11. As we can see in this concept, a modernization of the iPhone 5 design would be positively stunning, and if it looks anything like this concept — the front part, that is — then I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
The full video is embedded below, and don’t forget that I warned you about the projector mode.
