Behind The iPhone 5 Case Leaks

While we were still up in the air over if the iPhone would get redesigned into the iPhone 5 or just be an iPhone 4S, the thing that kept me believing that a radical form change was in the works was the cases. Major case manufacturers were creating products based on specs for a radically different body, like Case-Mate did in the images above.

Now BusinessWeek has gone behind the scenes and talked to some of the manufacturers about what happened, most notably Hard Candy, who received the iPhone 5 specs independently from three different sources, and so decided to invest $50,000 into design prototypes which ended up being incorrect.

What’s interesting here is that the case designers don’t pay for this information, it’s sent to them by Chinese factories in the hopes of courting their business.

Also of note: Hard Candy is keeping those molds they paid for, as they think the design might return in the future, saying “the data we got came from somewhere.”