It May Not Be the ‘iPhone 13’
Firstly, the jury is still out on what Apple will actually call this year’s iPhone model; it’s something we rarely know for sure until Apple takes the stage and formally announces the new lineup.
Last year the iPhone 12 name was pretty much locked in from the start, as the addition of 5G and a whole new design meant that it definitely needed a major numerical bump, and in a rare development we actually saw some leaked photos of product labels that gave away the names a few weeks before the launch. Unlike previous naming leaks from third-party accessory makers, who are usually as much in the dark as anybody else, these were purportedly of Apple’s own silicone cases.
This year, however, the name is far less of a certainty, and while everybody is calling it the “iPhone 13” for the sake of having to call it something, last month Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who generally has the inside track on such things, predicted that it might be the iPhone 12S instead.
While Apple skipped the iPhone 11S last year in its rush to 5G technology, that’s not necessarily a sign that the company has given up on “S models” entirely, as the lack of these have been the exception, rather than the rule — other than the aforementioned big iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 transition, the only other time we skipped an “S” model was with the iPhone 8, which really was for all intents and purposes an “iPhone 7S” from a design and features perspective, but it was also going up against Apple’s sleek new iPhone X at the time, so it needed to be positioned as a bigger upgrade to the traditional iPhone design.
So if the rumours of a relatively minor redesign are true — and we have no reason to believe they aren’t, as Apple has always stuck with its designs for a minimum of two years — then this year’s iPhone would clearly fit the classic “S model” mold, and become the “iPhone 12S.”