Apple has been known from time to time to make some curious design decisions. A perfect example is the current-generation Magic Mouse, which finally added a rechargeable battery but includes a charging port on the bottom of the device. Why is that a curious design decision? Most rechargeable mice have charging ports on the front so that they can actually be used while charging. With the port on the bottom, the Magic Mouse is absolutely useless while it’s being recharged.
When it comes to the iPhone lineup, however, Apple has consistently released best-in-class designs. In fact, the company’s current iPhone design is now three years old and yet it’s still among the most attractive phones in the world, and it’s still being copied by rivals. With the iPhone 8, Apple is expected to unveil a bold new design that is sleeker and more refined than anything we’ve seen before. That should be true, as long as the finished result looks absolutely nothing like the “iPhone 8” photos that leaked over the weekend.
In a bizarre turn of event, Apple accidentally confirmed the iPhone 8’s design on Friday evening when the company accidentally included imagery and key details in a firmware file for its upcoming HomePod speaker. It was a huge gaffe, but it didn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. Of course it’s still significant since it comes from the horse’s mouth.
The imagery included in the HomePod’s firmware was merely a sketch of the iPhone 8’s face, showing the basic layout of the front side of the phone and confirming the notch cut out of the top of the display where the sensors are. It doesn’t show us what the actual iPhone 8 will look like in real life, though we’ve had a pretty good idea since back in May when BGR confirmed the iPhone 8’s final design. Now, new images claim to show an iPhone 8 prototype in the wild, but they appear to be fake. And they had better be fake, because the device pictured here is absolutely hideous.
Posted to Weibo by a user whose name has been machine translated to “Han Han dignified,” the images show an abomination with a white back, polished silver edges, a white bezel on the front, and a black display. If we had time to fly to China to kill this grotesque beast with fire, we would.
Here are a few more shots from a subsequent post:
There has been a bit of debate regarding how Apple might approach the iPhone 8 when it comes to colors. As we opined back in mid-June, the cutout at the top of the iPhone 8’s display would make it impossible for Apple to release a well-designed iPhone with a white face. Instead, the face would have to be black and the areas on either side of the cut-out would be reserved only for status bar info. A recent report indeed suggested that Apple will indeed only release iPhone 8 models with front sides that are black, so the monstrosity above is almost certainly fake.
Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 8 in September alongside the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus, so any remaining questions will be answered soon enough.
