A possibly leaked photo of the motherboard of the next-generation iPhone reveals that the upcoming smartphone will continue along the release pattern Apple currently has in place, which is a major update then minor year after year. However, minor or not, it should still receive a spec bump, especially considering that pictured above might be Apple’s new A7 quad-core processor.
Above is a photo of a motherboard obtained by iOSDoc that looks very similar to the iPhone 5’s setup. This suggests the aforementioned release pattern, since the iPhone 5 was considered a major update. The iPhone 5S wouldn’t receive any design changes, but rather a spec bump. The iPhone 5 runs on Apple’s dual-core A6 chip clocked at 1.3GHz, so it comes as no surprise that we see here an Apple A7 chip.
The Apple A7 will supposedly be the first quad-core chip to appear in an iPhone, clocked at 1.2GHz. It’ll also feature the PowerVR quad-core SGX554MP4 GPU found in the iPad 4 and 2GB of RAM, according to the report. iOSDoc‘s source spoke briefly about iOS 7, presumably shipping alongside the iPhone 5S, saying Siri will “do a lot of new cool stuff” but remained silent about any other new features.
Taking a closer look at it, I’m not entirely sure if the A7 leak is authentic. This is just my own personal judgment, but it looks to me as if the “7” could have been photoshopped on to the image. It’s hard to make such a quick real-or-fake call on iPhone leaks when there’s so many of them. The leaked spec information seems plausible though, so it’s a mixed bag at this point.