9to5Mac Obtained Product Marketing Photos of ‘iPhone XS’ and Series 4 Apple Watch

Guilherme Rambo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

We believe that the new 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch iPhones will both be called iPhone XS. We also believe iPhone XS will come in a new gold color option not previously offered on the new design. Apple leaked its own gold version of the iPhone X through the FCC, but it has not been available to purchase.

Other details are still to be determined, but we can report with certainty that iPhone XS will be the name, the OLED model will come in two sizes including a larger version, and each will be offered in gold for the first time.

Wow.

They also have a photo of a Series 4 Apple Watch, showing off an altogether new watch face that takes advantage of the bigger display and shows at least 8 complications in addition to the time of day. I particularly dig the weather complication in the corner that shows the daily high and low in addition to the current temperature. It also looks like the red dot on the digital crown that signifies a cellular model is now a much more subtle red ring — nice.

I’d love to hear the backstory on how 9to5Mac got these images. 9to5Mac offers no explanation for how they obtained them. Product marketing images and the names of new iPhones almost never leak from Apple. iPhone names sometimes get leaked in iOS builds, but not photos like these. These photos were almost certainly intended for the keynote. To my memory, this is unprecedented. My guess is that no one at Apple gave these images to 9to5Mac. I suspect Rambo, who is extraordinarily clever at finding things, somehow discovered them through a URL that was exposed publicly but should not have been.

Update: I missed this tweet from Rambo earlier today, in which he suggests that he found these images from a streaming video test.

Update 2: It doesn’t really make any sense that a streaming video test would contain stuff like this. And in fact, I’ve confirmed that Rambo’s tweet about poking around streaming URLs was unrelated to the iPhone and Apple Watch images. I’m back on my first theory, that he uncovered these images from a URL that shouldn’t have been publicly available.

Update 3: Looks like my theory was correct. Rambo:

So, about those marketing images: they came from the recap section of the special event website. I used the URL pattern from the last event and guessed the device’s names. Apple took them down immediately after we published.

★ Thursday, 30 August 2018