When a company or product becomes the de facto industry leader, rumors and innuendo run rampant. When that same company or product has integral parts production lines with other companies or in other countries the job of keeping new product offerings and specification under wraps becomes next to impossible.
This is the problem for Apple and the iDevice product lines. This is also the reason that very specific product knowledge is available now for the yet-as-to-be-released iPhone 5S.
With an expected mid-September launch still possible, pictures and information about the iPhone, 5S have leaked from Apple's Chinese supply chain. The pictures were reportedly found on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, called Weibo, and posted by "C Technology" while internal specifications come from a Chinese-language hardware site called "EXP review." The pictures and information released is believed to be authentic and the actual specifications for the iPhone 5S.
What's New In The iPhone 5S And What Has Not Changed
The new iPhone 5S is reported to have the same stylistic features as the iPhone 5 but the internal specifications have changed significantly. The product is said to have a quad-core PowerVR SGX544MP4 Graphics Processor, a 4-inch IGZO display, 2GB of internal RAM, the introduction of NFC (near-field communication), and a fingerprint scanner.
However, the specification do not include an upgraded CPU as the iPhone 5S will continue to use the same Swift core found in the iPhone 5. While these reported specifications look good, they are only incremental updates over the existing iPhone 5, just as the iPhone 4S was compared to the iPhone 4.
The real story of the iPhone 5S specifications comes by way of the inclusion of NFC and the fingerprint scanner. The inclusion of these new items to the iPhone lineup indicates and new direction for Apple. As other companies continued to increase security offerings, Apple has always considered its operating systems and basic controls more than enough. By including biometric scanning technology and no-contact payment technology Apple has shown that the company is willing to increase base-level security on it's flagship product.