I agree that prototyping and design will have already been done - but this will partly be done by R&D and Prototyping and then they'll analyse the market etc - they'll have huge amounts of pipelines - look at AirPower, that was a foregone conclusion and marketing was done, it was announced etc and then they axed what it originally was. I'd love to see some stats on what's been through these pipelines before and the general public have never heard about.
An iPhone 14 Mini will probably be in R&D/Prototyping, and they'll probably have an iPhone 15 in there too already, or at least what it will be, but that's not even remotely true to say that there won't be a *insert product here* when the next gen of 13 hasn't even been announced, that's just rumourmongering and wishful thinking which is primarily what all of the leakers do to generate buzz and hype and money.
Kuo has been right a number of times yes, but how much of it is just analysis and trends, how much of it is supplier chain knowledge and how much of it is in fact 'inside information' I read somewhere that his success rate was around 75% that may be right, but it may be wrong, I don't know and don't particularly care either, but suffice it to say, we know that Apple have had a recent crackdown on leaks, so we're assigning values based on previous leaks. What I don't agree with is when people say there's not going to be x product or y product when they realistically don't have a clue.
It still stands that an iPhone 14 Mini in this case won't have a decision made on it I would think until any potential iPhone 13 Mini has been released and the market speaks for itself and they'll see if it's got good ROI.
