Archived Post

What we’ve learned from this weekend’s leaks

In case you were battening down the hatches for Hurricane (now Tropical Storm) Irma or just had a really big party weekend, you may have missed the fact that there was a leak of the iOS 11 Golden Master (final version) and the tvOS 11 firmware. As usual, a band of merry developers joined with Steve Troughton-Smith to sift through the code line by line to pull out secrets. Here’s some of what they found:

1 – It’s the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus

Dennis was correct in his predictions from this morning with the name of the high-end OLED screen iPhone, but missed on the iPhone 8/8 Plus.

2 – Face ID replaces Touch ID on the iPhone X

I got the name right on the replacement for Touch ID in my forecast of what will be shown tomorrow. There is a fun animation found by developer Guilherme Rambo that runs while you’re setting it up. 

3 – “Animoji”, cool animated emoji that can apparently be animated to follow what your face is doing (and play a recording of what you said)

4 – Some nice cameras on the iPhone X

Troughton-Smith found that the rear camera has a 12MP sensor that can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second or 1080p at 240 frames per second. The front camera boasts 7MP of resolution and can do 1080p video at 30 frames per second. The infrared camera (used for face detection) has a resolution of 1312 x 1104.

5 – RAM on the new phones

iPhone X will have 3GB of RAM, iPhone 8 Plus will have 3GB, iPhone 8 has 2GB.

6 – The Apple TV 4K

That’s the official name of the 5th-generation Apple TV, which will run a 3-core A10X Fusion CPU and boast 3GB of RAM. 

7 – Six cores on the A11 that will power the iPhone X

The A11 has two high power “Monsoon” cores and four low power “Mistral” cores. All of these are independently addressable. So think about it — a six-core processor in a phone. 

8 – 4K streaming on the new Apple TV needs a fast connection

You’ll need at least a 15 Mbps connection to stream 4K content. 

9 – The AirPod charging case gets a slight change

The LED moves to the outside, which is where it should have been all along

10 – The LTE Apple Watch looks great!

There’s a new Digital Crown (red to indicate that it’s an LTE model), new signal strength complications, and more). 

11 – 4K HDR Screensavers for Apple TV 4K

This may be reason enough to get an Apple TV 4K if you have a 4K UHDTV.

12 – New status bar to accommodate the “cutout” at the top of the iPhone X

When loading media, the activity indicator is no longer a “spinner” — instead, it’s a horizontal spinner (as seen from the side!). The battery, Wi-Fi and LTE signal strength “meters” are all on the right side of the display,

Steve Sande
the authorSteve Sande
Steve is the founder and former publisher of Apple World Today and has authored a number of books about Apple products. He's an avid photographer, an FAA-licensed drone pilot, and a really bad guitarist. Steve and his wife Barb love to travel everywhere!