Daring Fireball: Botched Release of Beta HomePod OS Reveals Details of New 2017 iPhones and HomePod

Botched Release of Beta HomePod OS Reveals Details of New 2017 iPhones and HomePod

Jason Snell, collecting a story revealed in a series of tweets over the weekend:

Nobody digs into Apple software releases like Steve Troughton-Smith. And this is a big one. Apparently Apple released a firmware download for the HomePod (not due until the end of the year!) on its servers, and inside that firmware there’s information about future iPhone hardware and support for an infrared face unlock feature code-named Pearl ID.

Among the details revealed:

The sound effects of the HomePod.
An icon for the high-end new iPhone matching rumored descriptions of a camera and sensor cutout at the top of an otherwise edge-to-edge top-to-bottom display.
The codename for the high-end new iPhone is D22.
D22’s display resolution is 1125 × 2436, which would allow @3× retina resolution like the Plus, but with no need for scaling. “True @3×” if you will. (This was rumored as far back as February.)
The HomePod does have a color display under that diffuser, with resolution of 272 × 340.
There are APIs for an infrared-based face recognizer.

How in the world does something like this happen? My understanding is that Apple is (or at least was) on the cusp of a widespread deployment of prototype HomePods to employees. Someone prepared an over-the-air software update and because it was intended to be distributed only to Apple employees, the OS was compiled without all the usual flags set to omit code that pertains to unreleased hardware. (Kind of makes sense, insofar as HomePod itself is unreleased hardware.) Building the OS without those flags set may not have been a mistake. But distributing it via a world-readable server was.

★ Tuesday, 1 August 2017