Apple’s next standard and budget iPhones may run on the same battery. A leaked image of what look like X-ray scans of two unreleased phones shows a 4,430mAh battery in each. The scans carry codenames, Taycan and Nevera, which the posts sharing them read as the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 18e. Nothing in the image says iPhone, and Apple hasn’t announced either phone, so treat this as a leak.
Fixed Focus Digital, a tipster on the Chinese social network Weibo, posted the image on 7th November 2026, after it had already been going round online. The tipster said industry contacts had confirmed it was close to the real thing, and added that both phones have 6.3-inch screens.
Where the extra battery comes from
Notes on the scans say the iPhone 18 has dropped its physical SIM tray, and that its bottom speaker and vibration motor have changed shape. Together, the notes say, those changes free enough room for a battery about 20% bigger. They give the 18e the same 4,430mAh battery, about 10% more than the 4,005mAh in the current iPhone 17e.
The battery is one of the biggest parts inside a phone, and everything else is packed around it. So room freed elsewhere can usually go to the battery. A SIM tray and its card reader are two of the parts taking up room around it. An eSIM, the alternative, is a SIM built into the phone that your network sets up over the air.
The iPhone 18 Pro, launched in September, already works this way. The eSIM-only version, sold in the US and a few other markets, got a 4,288mAh battery, against 4,056mAh in the version with a SIM tray.
What changes from today’s phones
The iPhone 17 has a 6.3-inch screen and a 3,692mAh battery. The notes start from 3,671mAh, but either way the jump to 4,430mAh is about 20%. The iPhone 17e has a 6.1-inch screen and one rear camera to the 17’s two, a split the scans keep. Its 4,005mAh battery is already bigger than the iPhone 17’s.
The 17e doesn’t last longer, though. Apple rates the 17e at up to 26 hours of video playback and the iPhone 17 at up to 30. The mAh figure is how much charge a battery holds. How long it lasts depends on how fast the rest of the phone uses that charge, as a 32-phone battery test showed this week. So a shared battery wouldn’t mean the 18 and 18e last equally long.
The screen is less settled. The scans show the inside of the phones, not the screen, so the 6.3-inch 18e rests on the tipster’s word. On 27th October 2026 another Weibo tipster, Digital Chat Station, said the 18e would get a 6.12-inch screen, about the 17e’s size, that refreshes 60 times a second. The iPhone 17’s screen goes up to 120 times a second, which makes scrolling look smoother. A 6.3-inch 18e still wouldn’t mean a 120Hz screen.
When, and what it means here
An analyst and two press reports put both phones around March 2027, as we explained in August. After Apple raised its US prices in September, the iPhone 17 starts at USD 899, or about KES 117,000, and the 17e at USD 699, or about KES 91,000. Apple hasn’t said what the new phones will cost.
The notes don’t say whether the iPhone 18 loses its SIM tray in every market. Today’s iPhone 17 and 17e still take a physical SIM in some markets, the UK among them. If the 18 goes eSIM-only everywhere, you’d need your network to move your line to an eSIM, as buyers of the eSIM-only iPhone Air, which is sold in Kenya, already do.
We think the battery is the more believable half of this leak. The scans come with an explanation of where the room came from, and it matches what Apple did on the 18 Pro. The 6.3-inch 18e is one tipster’s word against another’s. If the battery and the screen size both hold, the second camera would be one of the clearest differences between the two phones. If today’s USD 200 gap, about KES 26,000, stays, it would buy you less.
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