iPhone 14 Pro suddenly looks much more appealing

If you could have the best phone in any colour at all, what would it be? For me, I think the answer would be purple. Purple is the colour of wealth, luxury and royalty –whether the sadly missed Prince or other, more traditional forms of royalty – and of creativity, magic and fantasy. So I'm loving the latest iPhone 14 leak, which shows dummy models of the iPhone 14 Pro in a new and very attractive purple.

This is no ordinary purple, though. This is an Apple purple that, according to MacRumors, may use multiple layers of nanometre-scale metallic ceramics to give it a shimmery effect. That sounds similar to some colours we've seen from the likes of RealMe, and if that’s the case then the iPhone 14 Pro in Purple is going to be really hard to photograph and much better-looking in the metal than in the photos you'll see in early hands-on reviews.

Purple reign, purple reign

Purple's having a bit of a moment right now: the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus comes in a nice violet, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 comes in a new shade Samsung calls Bora Purple. Apple's purple is much deeper and darker than those, though, which makes sense: the colours of the iPhone 13 Pro are more sober than those of the standard iPhone, and that's clearly the case with the iPhone 14 Pro too. 

The other colours here are pretty much what you'd expect: while it's hard to judge colours accurately from a photo of dummy units there's clearly a Starlight-looking silver, a Midnight grey/black, a warm gold and then the blue and purple options. I think they're all really cute but it's the purple one I like best: even if it isn't magically shimmery I think it's a classy alternative to the rest of the iPhone 14 colour options, which are nice enough but overly familiar now.

We won't have long to wait before we see these new colours for ourselves: Apple's launch event is on Wednesday 7th September and we're expecting to see the iPhone 14, Apple Watch Series 8 and perhaps the AirPods Pro 2 too. If Apple decides to offer its best true wireless earbuds in that new purple colour, September's about to get even more expensive for me.