iPhone 14 lineup will reportedly feature pill-shaped cutout instead of a notch

Published On: January 4, 2022

Highlights

The Apple iPhone 14 series models will ditch the traditional notch in favour of a pill-shaped cutout.
The new punch-hole design could be limited to the iPhone 14 Pro models.
The Apple iPhone 14 series is expected to debut in September this year.

iPhone 14 will be Apple’s 2022 flagship and if past is anything to go by, the series might launch in September. There have been multiple rumours in recent times suggesting the Cupertino giant will bring many notable upgrades with regards to design and hardware specifications. Now, in the latest development, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg in the recent Power On newsletter has claimed the iPhone 14 series models won’t feature a traditional notch to house regular sensors. Instead, the iPhones will have a pill-shaped cutout on top of the screen to house the Face ID, front-facing camera and other sensors.

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It should be noted that reports point that the Apple iPhone 14 will retain the notch but the Pro will come with a new pill-shaped punch-hole cutout. This doesn’t coincide with what Apple had said earlier that the notch was necessary to house the required sensors for the front-facing camera and face ID. It should be interesting to see how Apple manages to house so many sensors under the tiny notch area. Prior to this report, a Korea-based publication, The Elec had claimed the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max will come with a punch-hole cutout on the screen instead of a notch.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had claimed the iPhone 14 models will have a punch-hole cutout. Since there are multiple reports about the same design, it looks almost confirmed. Apple had first introduced the notch with the iPhone X and has retained the same since then. However, the size has shrunk but with the recent iPhone 13. The notch houses a TrueDepth camera array that includes an infrared camera, front camera, dot projector, and a flood illuminator.

There are rumours claiming the company may adopt a laser-based time-of-flight architecture for Face ID and a unibody lens design that would help it reduce the size of the front-camera module.