The iPhone 16 has been tipped to showcase some fundamental changes to the button and camera layout after several years of iterative revisions.
According to information gained by MacRumors, we could set for some interesting button and camera design developments with next year’s iPhone 16. The website claims to have received details on early pre-production designs for Apple’s 2024 smartphone, and there are some interesting changes.
Mock-ups for the three devices (in yellow, pink, and black) said to be in testing show a phone with a vertically aligned camera module, one of which looks rather like the iPhone X module. This would make sense given Apple’s recent push with spatial video capture on the iPhone 15 Pro, which requires the two aligned cameras to function.
One of the designs also displays a new unified volume button rather than the separate up and down buttons that currently exist. It’s claimed that this would have been a solid state button that provided haptic feedback, but that the idea has been scrapped.
There’s also an action button on all three prototypes, which is a feature that looks set to come across from the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s suggested that this could switch to being capacitive in next year’s model.
Interestingly, the black model (which is said to be the most likely to see production) has a larger action button than the one we saw in the iPhone 15 Pro and the other two prototypes, as well as an additional Capture Button.
We’ve heard the latter mentioned before. It’s said to be a pressure-sensitive capacitive control that sits on the right-hand edge, below the power button, roughly where the 5G mmWave cutout is on US iPhone models.
Apple always runs prototypes of its devices ahead of production, so there’s no guarantee that the final iPhone 16 product will look exactly like any of these designs. It seems likely that the final product will draw heavily from these plans, though.
