14 DAY TRIAL // Images of a purported iPhone 5 logic board have leaked in Asia, with Chinese site Sina showing various close-ups of what appears to be the housing of an A5X chip.
The images reportedly stem from Vietnamese site Tinhte, a source that has a proven track record on Apple leaks.
The site has showed accurate images of various iPhone parts and prototypes over the past two years, making it fairly possible that they’re now showing the actual motherboard of the iPhone 5.
The PCB is said to house Apple’s dual-core A5X SoC (system on a chip) currently found in the third-generation iPad. For the iPhone 5, Apple may have tweaked its parameters a bit – for example, to save battery life.
To make one thing clear, there’s no confirmation that the PCB holds the A5X. The images don’t hold any evidence of that.
However, given Apple’s modus operandi, it would be almost impossible for the iPhone 5 to use the old A5 processor found in the iPhone 4S. Moreover, the next iPhone will undoubtedly need more processing power.
In addition to the two images showing the motherboard, Sina also shows a few images depicting various other parts that make up the next-generation Apple iPhone.
It isn’t clear what those parts are (we’ll ask the people at iFixit what they make of them) but they seem to be the very circuits that connect the logic board to the rest of the phone’s components (i.e. display, sensors, cameras, etc).
According to multiple reliable media sources who are generally privy of Apple’s festivities ahead of every other tech site / blog, the iPhone 5 launch event is slated for September 12.
In accordance with Apple’s schedule, the handset should become physically available about a week later. Some sources say the Cupertino giant will offer the phone through its stores on September 21. Customers will be able to pre-order the device between those two dates.
