iPhone Ultra representational image
Apple’s foldable iPhone is shaping up to be the most expensive iPhone in the company’s history, and possibly the first flagship in years to skip a lens. Fresh leaks point to camera covers in silver and a blue so dark it practically photographs as black, plus a module with four cutouts crammed into a space that thin. Two lenses, a flash, and a LiDAR scanner, all fighting for room on a phone that’s supposedly under 5mm thick when unfolded.
Squeeze a foldable hinge, a huge inner screen, and a battery big enough to survive the day into that body, and something has to give. Rumor has it the telephoto lens is the sacrifice. Meanwhile, the volume buttons got exiled to the top edge because apparently there was nowhere left on the sides to put them. For two grand, Apple’s asking you to zoom with your feet.
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The camera cover leak traces back to serial leaker Sonny Dickson, who posted photos this week of two protective covers made for the phone’s pill-shaped camera housing. Silver on one, a near-black midnight blue on the other, both hinting at a two-tone finish similar to what the iPhone 17 Pro already does with metal and glass. Worth noting these are third-party accessories, so the exact shades could shift once Apple reveals the real thing, but the design language tracks with everything else we’ve seen leak out of the supply chain this year.
The missing telephoto lens has actually been floating around since a leak from Jukanlosreve earlier this year, which described the rear camera setup as just a main and an ultra-wide, no zoom lens included. That’s a real gut punch for a device expected to start north of $1,999. Every other Pro-tier iPhone has shipped with three rear cameras for years, so watching Apple’s most expensive model potentially step backward on optics is the kind of contradiction that makes leak season fun.
The button situation is its own small mystery. Weibo leaker Instant Digital called the top-edge, right-aligned volume buttons back in February (similar to the iPad mini), and case cutouts from third-party manufacturer iFunSmart later lined up with that placement. No Action Button either, which has been a Pro lineup staple since the iPhone 15. Small details, but they paint a picture of a phone where every millimeter of internal real estate got fought over.
I’ve been tracking this device for a while, and the specs keep circling the same core tension. Concept work based on leaks pegged the battery at a massive 5,700mAh and the hinge at a liquid metal build engineered to erase the usual foldable crease entirely. Add a titanium frame and an A20 Pro chip on a 2nm process, and you’ve got a phone that’s clearly engineered within an inch of its life. It’s just wild that with all that effort going into thinness and battery life, the zoom lens ended up on the cutting room floor.
Apple’s expected to make everything official in mid-September (I can’t believe we’re exactly a month away), and if Dickson’s photos are accurate, we already know what the colorway conversation is going to look like. Safe, metallic, a little moody. The bigger story might not be the color at all. It might be everything Apple had to leave out to build this phone.
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