New Apple iPhones are about as regular a yearly occurrence as the leaves changing colors, and the release date for Apple’s next iPhone is quickly approaching. There’s no date certain as yet, but tech observers feel like they’ve got a pretty good idea of when the follow-up to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will hit stores, as well as what consumers can expect from Apple’s next flagship handset.
In fact, the release date for the next iPhone has been rumored for nearly a month now, with news emerging in early June that an internal Vodafone email had apparently leaked the launch date for the 2015 iPhone, which is presumed to be named the iPhone 6s. The Vodafone email carried information on the pre-launch, pre-order, and launch period for Apple’s iPhone 6s, and it claimed the pre-order period would commence on September 18, with the next-gen iPhone officially releasing on September 25 .
As exciting as that might be for some Apple lovers, predicting the release window for a new iPhone isn’t all that hard. Since the iPhone 4, the latest that Apple has released any iPhone model was the October 14 release date for the iPhone 4S in 2011. The iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, and iPhone 6 all released in mid-to-late September, and Apple appears to be sticking with that tradition for this year’s iPhone.
And what can Apple fans expect to see from the next iPhone? The off-year “S” upgrades are often simply refinements of the previous years’ iPhones, and it looks as though the iPhone 6s will continue in that vein. Apple news site 9to5Mac recently acquired pictures of purported components for the next iPhone, and they appear to show that Apple won’t be changing the iPhone’s look for its September debut. Instead, the changes will be all on the inside.
The iPhone 6s is expected to feature Apple’s Force Touch display technology, which would give users a wider array of ways to interact with the device’s display based on how firmly they pressed it. Apple will also likely boost the camera capacity of the iPhone 6s to 12-megapixels, adding the capacity to shoot 4K video and 240 frames-per-second slow-mo video.
Apple will also likely add a new pink color option for the iPhone, as well as a faster Touch ID fingerprint scanner, according to recent leaks published by PhoneArena .
Of course, Apple’s notorious secrecy surrounding all things iPhone means that we won’t get any verification of any of these claims until Apple shows off the new iPhone models some time later, likely in late August or early September. Still, the iPhone prediction game is pretty well advanced now, and it’s likely that exactly these features – and maybe a few surprises – will be what we see when Apple CEO Tim Cook takes the stage this fall to tell iPhone lovers what they’ll be lining up for in just a couple weeks’ time.