In the mobile world, one thing is certain: Apple will release new iPhones this year. The iPhone 14 lineup is currently expected to appear in September or October 2022, bringing new capabilities and new design touches.
iPhone rumors are a dirty business. A lot of them originate with totally unverified, and unverifiable, posts on microblogging sites like Weibo. Literally anyone can post something random on Weibo and get picked up by a bunch of websites as a source. The second tier come from analysts with sources at Apple’s suppliers, but they can’t confirm whether or not they’re just seeing something Apple is experimenting with and decided not to use.
With that said, here are the iPhone rumors we trust so far.
The iPhone 14 Release Date Is This Fall
Although supply-chain problems have created issues for several phone releases, Apple has kept its phones largely on time. We still anticipate that Apple will hold an iPhone 14 launch event on a Tuesday or Wednesday in mid-September 2022, with the phones hitting shelves 9-10 days later.
iPhone Mini Is Dead; Only Pro Phones Get A16
Major iPhone analyst Ming Chi Kuo recently opened a Twitter account and has been dropping high-quality rumors on it. His first blockbusters are that the iPhone mini line is dead, and only the two Pro-model iPhones will get the new A16 processor.
The news about the mini is sad, but it isn’t a big surprise. Counterpoint Research says that the iPhone 13 mini, like the 12 mini, was the worst-selling iPhone in its cohort.
The A16 news poses a unique challenge for the iPhone line, though, as new features often depend on new silicon—even camera features like Deep Fusion and night mode, which are now more computational than optical.
iPhone 14 Pro Will Have a Hole-Punch Design
On the Pro model phones, the notorious notch will be replaced by an oval-shaped Face ID cutout and a hole-punch camera, according to MacRumors. Together, the two elements will take up about the same space as the notch, but they’ll be surrounded by live pixels and will thus be less of a visual interruption in the face of the phone.
iPhone 14 Pro Will Have a ’48MP’ Camera
A Taiwanese research firm says the iPhone 14 Pro will have a “48 megapixel” camera with 8K video recording. I say “48 megapixel” here because it’s likely to use quad-pixel binning to give 12-megapixel images. The 48-megapixel main wide lens may also combine with the optical zoom lens to give greater “fused” zoom than the optical lenses can alone.
iPhone 14 Pro Will Have 8GB of RAM
This is a very boring rumor, but it’s out there.
iPhone 14 Needs Something to Differentiate Itself
There’s a big problem with all of the rumors above—they show the iPhone 14 Pro to be a phone with many new features, but there’s very little out there about the Phone 14 and new iPhone 14 Max. Unless new rumors come out, the new phones may mostly be iPhone 13 models with a new number on them.
AT&T’s New 5G and Better Reception?
One change Apple likely won’t talk much about: iPhone 14 will almost certainly use Qualcomm’s X65 modem, which has several advantages over the X60 in the iPhone 13. It will support AT&T’s new 3.45GHz 5G, which the iPhone 13 series does not. It also might—might!—have much better low-signal reception than the iPhone 13 series does. That’s what I found with the Galaxy S22 over the Galaxy S21.
