We were sent this video anonymously earlier this evening. The tipster says it shows the iPhone 5.
Watch as the user goes into System Settings. They select a special “Developers” tab, which then allows them to switch graphics processors.
The “Developers” tab suggests it’s a special prototype provided to partners to test the graphics performance…
The GX535 is currently used in the iPhone 4. The iPad 2 uses the PowerVR SGX 543MP2, which is a screamer.
The other GPU in the video, the SGX545, was announced in January 2010. It’s a high-definition GPU, optimized for 3D. The specs say it delivers 40 million polygons per second at 200MHz. Apple is a part owner in the Imagination Technologies.
This could be fake, however. Someone may have created a fake “Developer” application that would add a phony tab to the Settings menu.
But if the video is genuine, the iPhone 5 looks just like the iPhone 4…
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
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52 responses to “Is This an iPhone 5 Prototype Switching GPUs? [Video]”
If *if* this is real, I really hope they have implemented it better than on the Macbook Pro range.
It’s probably fake. If it was an iPhone 5, when he opens the settings app, it would’ve loaded faster (like an iPad 2), but in the video it opens at the speed that an iPhone 4 does.
If you take a closer look you’ll see that facebook app settings are now in the middle of the “preloaded” apps settings. i don’t have iOS5 so I don’t know if this is “normal” or not, but can you check?
Also, this may be the case of the fb integration that made the news yesterday and on Monday…
Finally, this can be an iphone 5 guts in an iphone 4 case. I seriously doubt that a developer would have access to iPhone 5 final design….
Am I the only one that noticed the Facebook setting tab located in the top section, like it is integrated with the OS like twitter…
‘But if the video is genuine, the iPhone 5 looks just like the iPhone 4…’ this made me crack up! I don’t believe it but that 29 seconds was worth watching for that line :D
” Someone may have created a fake “Developer” application that would add a phony tab to the Settings menu.”
I’m pretty sure a developer can’t add anything to that part of the menu. It would appear below with iBooks and the rest (which is in the next section below)
Sounds interesting.
The mute button is on the left hand side!
“But if the video is genuine, the iPhone 5 looks just like the iPhone 4…”
Serious question – do you have long-term memory issues? It wasn’t that long ago that the rumour was that the iPhone 5 was being tested in iPhone 4 clothing, so that it would be impossible to guess what the finalised iPhone 5 (4S, whatever) will look like. So this could be genuine in regards to the internals and screen resolution, but not in regards to screen size and overall design.
Jailbroken iPhone?
Ok, lets get this straight. There is NO WAY someone would just have a working “iPhone 5” and be able to throw a video up on YouTube. Apple is a little smarter then that.
Might just be IOS5 running with the toggle in the software on an iPhone 4, with the toggle doing nothing more than refreshing the screen rather than toggling GPU’s. Or it could be the Iphone 5, which looks exactly like the iPhone 4, blah blah. Let’s just wait till next week.
Did Anyone notice the Videos and Music Icon ? I think only the iPod’s have them. not iPhones -> united in iPod (icon)
This could be an early developer build of iOS 4. If you remember, there was to be FB integration initially but was axed due to what were called onerous terms from Zuckerberg et al. Same reason the FB integration was axed from Ping. I call fake on this one, a good fake but a fake none the less.
Yeah, it takes a real Apple Genius to leave a prototype iPhone 4 laying around in a bar. Also, to assume that the iPhone in the video couldn’t have just been remotely wiped is to assume the person in the video isn’t the rightful owner.
in iOS 5 the video and music are separate. Apple’s way of making iOS similar across all devices
The screen is bigger than an iPhone 4, no?
I DON’T WANT the iPhone 5 to look just like the iPhone 4! Would I even want to buy the ugliest iPhone just because it’s new (and upgrade from my 3GS)? Or would I just wait for the next iPhone some time in 2012?
Am I missing something – but why(how??) do they put 2 different chips in the phone when space is ultra crammed? FAKE!
Beat me to it. Totally agree.
If you believe the whole article, the phone was designed to test both the graphics chips.
So, it then follows that if the second chip was added, something else would have been reduced, such as the battery, to accommodate the chip space. And if it’s just the GPU they are switching, which in the Apple A_ chips is only a small portion of the chip (May I remind you it contains the RAM, the processor, and the GPU) it doesn’t surprise me that they may have created a A4.5 chip with both.Another thing: This doesn’t show the back of the phone at any point in the video. Perhaps the back protrudes more than in the iPhone 4 to accommodate this…
In any case, we’ll find out (hopefully) in the October 4th press event. Watch the Apple Space :P
Or in other words, Apple CBF recoding iOS to have the iPod app in iPhone.
It’s not prerelease iOS 4. Note “Newsstand” and “Reminders” on the springboard.
Note it was on the original GPU first up.
Unless I’m wrong, and the GPU has nothing to do with app startup animations…
I do not believe that apple would put something like this in their settings app…simply because as a company that goes after ease of use than anything else, doing this would be contradictory to their cause…
If this phone is only designed to test the two GPUs, then why would Apple put it in the new casing (assuming there isn’t going to be a 4S), and risk someone leaking it– just like this app supposedly was?
The look of the phone should have no effect on the graphics processors and therefore isn’t relevant.
Well, animations would fall under the “graphics” label. It might make sense that they’re handled by the iPhone’s GPU.