iPhone 18 Pro Leak: Cherry Red Color, Smaller Dynamic Island Revealed

The biggest iPhone 18 Pro leak in Apple’s recent history has just gotten significantly bigger. What started as a handful of drop-test videos surfacing online has ballooned into a torrent of internal schematics, color references, motherboard diagrams, and pre-production blueprints — all traced back to a massive data breach at Tata Electronics, one of Apple’s most critical manufacturing partners in India.

• The iPhone 18 Pro leak originated from a 630GB breach at Apple manufacturing partner Tata Electronics, exposing internal blueprints and test videos.
• The iPhone 18 Pro leak confirms a Cherry Red finish as the finalized new color option, replacing an earlier burgundy candidate that didn’t make the cut.
• Schematics show Apple moving the infrared flooder under the display to shrink the Dynamic Island notch on the iPhone 18 Pro.
• Apple is adopting WMCM chip packaging on the A20 Pro SoC to improve heat dissipation alongside a reportedly larger vapor chamber.

How the iPhone 18 Pro Leak Happened

The group behind the breach, identified as World Leaks, reportedly extracted over 200,000 files totalling 630GB from Tata Electronics’ internal systems. That’s not a minor exfiltration — that’s a wholesale raid on one of the most confidential corners of Apple’s supply chain. Tata Electronics, which began assembling iPhones in India in late 2023, has quickly become central to Apple’s strategy to diversify production away from China. The sensitivity of what was stored there — and what’s now been exposed — reflects exactly how deep that manufacturing relationship runs.

What makes this iPhone 18 Pro leak particularly striking isn’t just the volume of data. It’s the type. Detailed internal schematics, motherboard layouts, and video footage of devices undergoing structured drop tests are materials that typically never leave a production facility — not even after a product has launched. The fact that this level of documentation is now circulating online puts Apple in an unusually uncomfortable position.

Cherry Red Is In — Burgundy Didn’t Make the Cut

For color enthusiasts, the iPhone 18 Pro leak delivers a clear answer to one of the more debated questions heading into the iPhone 18 cycle. Earlier rumors and leaks had pointed to a burgundy or wine-toned finish, and that color does appear in the leaked files — but as a CMF (Color, Material, Finish) testing candidate, not a final production choice. According to leakers sharing files in their Discord channels, the burgundy option was evaluated and ultimately passed over.

What appears to have taken its place is a finish being described as Cherry Red. This is distinct from the burgundy in that it reads as a cleaner, more saturated red rather than a dark, muted wine tone. Images shared by EarlyAppleLeaks on Discord show what this color looks like on the actual device form factor, and it’s a bold choice — arguably the most vivid iPhone color Apple has released since the (Product)RED iterations on earlier models.

A black variant is also visible in the leaked imagery. Whether that represents a new finish name or a continuation of existing black options — like the Titanium Black on the iPhone 16 Pro — isn’t yet clear from the available files.

The iPhone 18 Pro Leak Confirms a Smaller Dynamic Island

One of the more technically interesting revelations in this iPhone 18 Pro leak concerns the Dynamic Island. Rumors about a reduced-size pill cutout have been circulating for months, but the Tata schematics now offer a credible explanation for how Apple intends to pull it off.

The key is the infrared flooder — a component in the Face ID sensor array that, on current iPhones, sits within the Dynamic Island cutout itself. According to schematics shared on X by user ldt, Apple is moving that infrared flooder beneath the display on the iPhone 18 Pro, mounting it under the panel on the side. With one less component needing physical space in the cutout, the pill shape can shrink meaningfully without compromising Face ID functionality.

This kind of under-display sensor migration is something the broader Android ecosystem has been experimenting with for years — under-display cameras and fingerprint sensors are now standard on flagship Android devices. Apple has historically taken a more conservative approach, prioritising reliability and accuracy over form factor. Moving the infrared flooder under glass while maintaining Face ID’s security standards would be a quietly significant engineering achievement, even if the end result looks like a small cosmetic change to most users.

WMCM Packaging and What It Means for Thermal Performance

Beyond design, the iPhone 18 Pro leak also sheds light on what’s happening inside the chip stack. Motherboard schematics point to Apple adopting WMCM — Wafer-level Multi-Chip Module — packaging for the A20 Pro SoC. This is a packaging architecture that places the DRAM directly adjacent to the main processor die within the same module, rather than on a separate package connected elsewhere on the board.

The thermal implications here are real. On current iPhone Pro models, heat dissipation has been a well-documented concern during sustained workloads — the A-series chips are extraordinarily powerful, but that performance generates heat in a device with almost no room for active cooling. By moving the DRAM to the side of the A20 Pro SoC, the chip itself makes better direct contact with the vapor chamber. And that vapor chamber, per the leaked diagrams shared by Reddit user techkernels, is reportedly larger on the iPhone 18 Pro than anything Apple has used before.

WMCM packaging isn’t entirely new territory — it’s conceptually adjacent to technologies like TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) used in AI accelerators, or Samsung’s own advanced packaging plays. What’s notable is Apple bringing this level of packaging sophistication into a consumer smartphone. If the thermal gains are meaningful in practice, it could address one of the few remaining criticisms of iPhone Pro performance — that the chip throttles under extended load.

The Broader Implications of This Scale of Breach

It’s worth stepping back and looking at what this iPhone 18 Pro leak actually represents beyond the hardware details. Apple’s supply chain security has long been considered among the tightest in consumer electronics. Competitors routinely lose details about unannounced products, but truly sensitive internal documentation — the kind of engineering files this leak contains — almost never surfaces for Apple devices.

That changes with this breach. The fact that 630GB of manufacturing data was accessible, and that it included not just spec sheets but pre-release test videos and detailed schematics, points to a serious security gap somewhere within Tata’s systems. Apple maintains strict NDAs and access controls with its manufacturing partners, but a breach at that partner’s end is something Apple can’t fully control through its own policies. This will almost certainly accelerate conversations internally about how much sensitive design data gets shared with assembly partners, and at what stage of production.

For consumers and analysts, though, the practical effect is an unusually clear picture of what the iPhone 18 Pro will look like and how it’ll work — months before Apple is ready to talk about it. This iPhone 18 Pro leak has shown that World Leaks has indicated there’s more data still to come from the same tranche of files. If that’s true, the next few months of iPhone 18 pre-launch coverage are going to look very different from any Apple product cycle we’ve seen before.

Source: Android Authority

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