The iPhone 14 Pro series will sport a pill-shaped hole-punch design for its front-facing camera, with the bulk of Apple’s Face ID technology being positioned beneath the display, according to Twitter leaker DylanDKT (instead of an eyesore of a notch).
The storey backs with prior reports from respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from late last year, who predicted that the camera on the 2022 iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max would be replaced by a hole-punch cutout.
With last year’s iPhone 13 series, Apple introduced its first big update to the iPhone’s Face ID notch, which had a slightly smaller notch than the original design that Apple has employed since 2017’s iPhone X.
Moving the Face ID array beneath the screen while maintaining a cutout makes sense for a couple of reasons: Face ID’s IR-based setup would be less affected by the haziness and weak colours that plague current under-display front-facing cameras, and shrinking the iPhone 14 Pro’s notch to a smaller cutout would put Apple back on par with Android competitors, who have long since left Apple’s oversized notch in the dust with years of diminutive camera cutout designs.
However, the slimmed-down notch appears to be Apple’s design differentiation between the pricier iPhone 14 Pro lineup and the basic iPhone 14 models, which are rumoured to preserve the existing Face ID notch.
Furthermore, it appears that Apple’s under-display ambitions will still be limited to the Face ID camera array: according to Kuo’s late 2021 estimate, Apple’s long-rumoured plans to bring back its Touch ID sensor in the form of an under-display fingerprint reader won’t materialise until at least 2023.
DylanDKT also predicts that an updated iPhone SE model will be introduced in 2022, with the same broad design as the present 2020 SE but with 5G and better specs. Meanwhile, a foldable iPhone is still in the prototyping stage, with Apple apparently “playing the long game to observe how the technology progresses” before committing to a commercial device – a claim that matches Kuo’s previous reports.
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