Apple may be adding a third camera to the iPhone, and this it how it might look. At least that’s what three of the most reliable phone experts — Steve Hemmerstoffer, aka OnLeaks, Ice Universe and Venya Geskin — are claiming online. Yeah, this rendering looks pretty ugly.

In this video, the sensors are aligned in a triangle on the right edge of the phone. The flash LED and a microphone hole sandwich the third vertex of the triangle. The flash is aligned with the third sensor, but seems to have no spatial relationship to anything: it’s off the center of the curve of the camera patch.

(Image credit: Onleaks/Digit)

This camera patch — for a lack of a better name — doubles down on the current iPhone’s camera bump. It also doubles down on the ugliness and inconvenience you encounter when you have to lie your phone down on its back. It seems that the rumored electromagnetic field technology to eliminate the camera bump forever may not be ready to make it to the next iPhone.

Yet Hemmerstoffer claims that the “2019 iPhones are still in the Engineering Validation Test and there could be changes in the details.”



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Hemmerstoffer also says that next year, there will be again three new iPhones: the successors to the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR.

It would be somewhat surprising if Apple added a third camera to its phones, especially in such an aesthetically unpleasant way. Perhaps Apple believes that it might be better able to complete with Samsung and Huawei (Nos. 1 and 2 in worldwide smartphone sales, respectively) to help it get out of the crisis Apple is now suffering.

Maybe Apple needs to add more than another enhancement to cameras that are already pretty damn good. We’d argue that much better battery life and a new design that eliminates the notch would be more likely to make people line up for new iPhones -- not something that makes iPhones look this ugly.

