The launch date for the much anticipated arrival of the iPhone 6 appears to have been confirmed in leaked images published on a French website.
Related: Apple Sends Out Invitations for Likely iPhone 6 Launch
The French Apple fansite nowhereelse.fr uploaded a photograph on Monday which they claim is promotional artwork for Apple’s new smartphone. The image featured the date Tuesday, September 9th, the same day previous reports claimed Apple was planning a “big media event”.
According to The Telegraph, the site’s editor Steve Hemmerstoffer said the artwork had been passed on to him by his “most trusted and loyal Chinese sources”, who had given him a similar piece of artwork “just hours before the launch conference of the iPhone 5s”.
The allegedly leaked image also shows a new location for the wake/sleep button, which has been moved from the top of the phone to its right-hand side. A similar image provided to the site last year rightly identified a new home button on the iPhone 5s with fingerprint authentication, hours before Apple officially launched it.
The site quotes a second source who said the iPhone 6 will feature a 4.7-inch display and come in a 126 GB version, compared to the 5s’ 4-inch screen and 64 GB of maximum internal storage. Apple has said that it is planning two different screen sizes for the iPhone 6, one of which is rumoured to be the larger 5.5-inch “phablet” version to be named the iPhone 6L.
MacRumours, via the Telegraph, has disputed the authenticity of the image posted on the French site. They say the artwork’s font is not consistent with Apple’s usual style and also note that the date printed on the leaked iPhone 5s card actually referred to the launch of iOS 7 not the launch of the 5s.
The website conclude that if the leaked iPhone 5s card did not depict the phone’s debut date, it would therefore be unlikely that the leaked iPhone 6 artwork would display the phone’s release date over the iOS date.