iPhone 5 The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.
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iPhone 5 — Technical Specifications (Apple Support)

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The iPhone 5 is a smartphone designed and marketed by Apple, and the sixth generation of the iPhone. It was announced on September 12, 2012, and released on September 21, 2012. After five years of 3.5-inch screens, it stretched the display to 4 inches — taller, not wider — and swapped the nine-year-old 30-pin dock connector for Lightning, resetting an entire accessory ecosystem.

The changes ran deeper than the screen. A machined aluminum unibody replaced the iPhone 4 era's glass sandwich, making the 5 dramatically light in the hand: 112 grams and 7.6 mm, 20% lighter and 18% thinner than the iPhone 4s. Inside, the Apple A6 debuted Apple's first custom-designed CPU core ("Swift"), and LTE arrived on an iPhone for the first time. It shipped with iOS 6, whose new Apple Maps proved rocky enough to draw a public apology from Tim Cook.

Commercially the iPhone 5 was enormous — two million pre-orders in 24 hours, five million units the first weekend — yet its flagship run was the shortest in the line's history: one year later Apple discontinued it outright, replacing it with the plastic iPhone 5c carrying nearly identical internals.

The iPhone 5's body is machined from 6061 anodized aluminum with inlaid glass windows at the top and bottom of the back — the first unibody iPhone, produced to tolerances Apple measured in microns and photographed against jewelry in its marketing. It came in two two-tone finishes: White & Silver, and Black & Slate, the latter with a dark anodized frame.

The 4-inch display keeps the 326 ppi Retina density at 1136 × 640, adding a fifth row of home-screen icons and a 16:9 aspect ratio that finally suited widescreen video. Apple justified the taller-not-wider geometry ergonomically: every corner of the screen remains reachable one-handed. In-cell touch technology laminated the digitizer into the LCD itself, making the screen thinner and the image feel closer to the glass.

The anodized Black & Slate finish proved delicate — "scuffgate" complaints about chipped edges dogged the early months, and Apple's marketing chief famously replied that scuffs on anodized aluminum were "normal."

The 30-pin dock connector, introduced with the 2003 iPod, gave way to Lightning: an all-digital, eight-pin, reversible plug roughly 80% smaller. Reviewers praised the connector itself and criticized the transition — every dock, cable, and car integration built over nine years needed a $29 adapter. Lightning went on to serve the iPhone for eleven years before USB-C replaced it in 2023. The iPhone 5 also debuted Apple's redesigned EarPods in the box.

The A6 marked a turning point in Apple silicon: rather than licensing ARM's Cortex cores, Apple designed its own ARMv7-compatible core, Swift, delivering roughly double the CPU performance of the 4s at 1.3 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. The chip was also Apple's first with custom-tuned graphics arrangement, foreshadowing the fully custom silicon strategy that now defines the company.

LTE arrived a year after Android rivals, deliberately: Apple waited for a single-chip modem solution (Qualcomm's MDM9615) that wouldn't wreck battery life, and the 5 still rated 8 hours of LTE browsing. Dual-band Wi-Fi was another first for the line.

The 8-megapixel sensor matched the 4s on paper but shrank 25% in physical depth to fit the thinner body, gaining a sapphire crystal lens cover, better low-light performance via improved image signal processing, and 40% faster capture. Panorama mode — sweeping a full 28-megapixel image in one motion — debuted here, as did the ability to shoot stills during video recording. The front camera jumped from VGA to a 1.2 MP 720p FaceTime HD sensor.

The iPhone 5 shipped with iOS 6, remembered mostly for what it removed: Google Maps and the YouTube app exited the OS, and Apple's replacement Maps launched with distorted landmarks, missing towns, and unreliable directions. The backlash was severe enough that Tim Cook published an open letter apologizing and — extraordinarily — recommending competitors' apps while Apple fixed its own. The episode contributed to the departure of iOS chief Scott Forstall that October.

The phone received iOS 7's visual overhaul in 2013 and updates through iOS 10.3.4 in 2019, including a final GPS-rollover fix issued years after discontinuation. It missed iOS 11, drawing the 32-bit era to a close.

The iPhone 5 logged two million pre-orders in the first 24 hours — double the 4s — and five million sales in the opening weekend, constrained more by supply than demand; the aluminum unibody was hard to manufacture at quality, and lead times stretched for weeks. Reviews were among the strongest Apple had ever received, calling it the best smartphone available: the weight reduction, screen, LTE, and build quality drew near-universal praise, with Maps and the Lightning transition the recurring complaints.

In an unprecedented move, Apple discontinued its reigning flagship after a single year on September 10, 2013 — the iPhone 5s took the high end while the iPhone 5c repackaged the 5's internals in polycarbonate at the mid-tier, ending the tradition of last year's flagship soldiering on at $99.

The iPhone 5 settled the design language wars twice over: its taller 16:9 screen ended the 3.5-inch era, and its chamfered aluminum unibody became one of the most imitated industrial designs in the industry — Apple itself returned to it for the iPhone SE and, in spirit, the flat-sided iPhone 12 onward. Lightning outlived the phone by a decade. And the A6's Swift core was the opening move of Apple's custom-CPU strategy, the through-line to every A- and M-series chip since, including the silicon in the current iPhone 17 generation.