Would you buy a gold iPhone 5S?

Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5S will arrive slathered in gold according to the latest online whispers. Has the iRumour mill finally gone off the rails?

Apparently not, at least if MG Siegler at TechCrunch‘s sources are to be believed. He seems adamant that the iPhone 5S will get a blinged-up gold paint job to join the ranks of the current black and white options, and while our eyebrows are expertly raised, there are a few factors that lend some credibility to the speculation.

According to iMore‘s Ally Kazmucha (who’s familiar with the anodising process), gold is one of the easiest colours to infuse onto an iPhone, with true black being one of the hardest.

Not only that, but gold is also one of the most common post-purchasing colour treatments  and is a coveted colour in Asian markets.

Still skeptical? We don’t blame you. Gold colouring does after all, scream tacky –  a word that’s never featured in Apple’s vocabulary before.

But we’re now living in a world where we’re weeks away from a budget plastic iPhone 5C – itself an attempt to grab some of the market share in emerging economies – and where the iPad Mini is a thing that actually exists, despite Steve Jobs himself famously stating that micro tablets would be dead on arrival.

If Apple manages to capture the subtlety of the Asus Transformer Prime‘s champagne gold colouring (as opposed to entering gaudy Halloween costume jewellery territory), then a gold iPhone might not be so bad after all.

Stay tuned till 10 September, where all will be revealed at Apple’s iPhone launch event.

[iMore, TechCrunch, image: Macboutic]