The best iPhone colour could be coming back! Back! BACK!

This year’s iPhone refresh will have you seeing red – and that’s a good thing

A concept render of the iPhone 15 Pro in red finish
(Image credit: 9TechEleven)

The iPhone 15 launch is still a bit away – as ever, we’re expecting the next iPhone to launch in September – but it’s a safe bet that this year’s models will come in some different colours than the iPhone 14. And it looks like an old favourite may be coming back for 2023.

According to 9to5Mac, there are two new colours coming to the iPhone 15 range: one for the standard iPhone 15 and presumably the Plus too, and one for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

The new colours are believed to be a new green colour for the standard iPhone, and a crimson red for the Pro. We’ve heard about that crimson colour option before: 9to5Mac leaked it earlier this year. But that report has now been corroborated by a second leaker on the Chinese social media network Weibo. And that leaker has chops: they previously leaked the existence of the purple iPhone 15 Pro.

 The iPhone 15 sounds like it’ll be pretty, good 

According to the source, the new colour for the iPhone 15 Pro will be crimson but “may be a little lighter” than the shade of purple in the current Pro. It’ll still be “very deep”, apparently, but just not quite as deep. I really like the sound of this, because I think dark red phones look really classy: my iPhone’s in a dark red leather case for that very reason.

As for the vanilla iPhone, the new green colour will be “close to the green of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 11”. That particular colour was a crisp, fresh minty green, so it’ll be nice to see that return later this year if indeed the rumour is correct.

It’ll be particularly interesting to see the iPhone Pro, because that model is expected to get a titanium frame this time around – and that means it’s a new material for Apple to coat and colour. I do wonder if, as with the purple iPhone Pro, that means supplies of the red iPhone Pro may be fairly limited at launch time.  

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).