iPhone 5S and 5C rumours: sapphire home button?

According to the often spot-on Apple rumour site, Macotakaro, the upcoming budget iPhone 5 — which most of us have taken to calling the “Budget iPhone” — will actually be called the “5C”.  The site’s sources also stress that the iPhone 5S will have an A7 CPU, with the A6 CPU being pushed into the new iPad Mini, if IBTimes has anything to say about it. Let’s stick with the 5S for a bit though.

Concave sapphire

Most sites have all but confirmed that the next home button, the physical key that brings users back to the home screen, will be concave and not convex. If the home button is going to stick out, then analysts such as the esteemed ones who frequent CultOfMac, have said that the new button will be made of sapphire. A sapphire is practically immune to scratches, but this would be an expensive swap from plastic to precious stone. The rumour states that the new sapphire button would be capacitive, so we guess that the tales of an embedded fingerprint reader stem from this, or is it the other way around?

CultOfMac reels in an expert/analyst/fortune-teller named Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities. Ming-Chi says that a fingerprint sensor will be underneath the newly designed button of the iPhone 5S. This leads directly to the convex home button, says Ming-Chi. “However, assembling it could be difficult as the space under home button is limited as it already has to accommodate the Lightning connector, speaker and microphone. Thus, we think the shape of the home button could be changed from concave to convex to create more space for a fingerprint sensor.” The home button could end up having absolutely nothing to do with the heavily rumoured fingerprint scanner as well.

Colours now. The iPhone 5S will have two colours, with a third being “optional”. Dark Grey, White and the optional Champagne Gold. Pretty gaudy colour, but the iPhone 5 has got those neatly chamfered edges in silver. Hopefully pushing the colour spectrum into gold won’t break the style sheet for Apple. Five colours were pictured here though, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Wondering why Apple would call its budget smartphone the 5C? So were we. Our best guess (our only guess in fact) is that the C stands for Colour. We’re a bit sick of these rumours, but at least it’ll all be over soon because according to Business Insider, the next iThingy event is 10 September 2013. Sweet relief.

Image: CultOfMac.com