I've been seeing "leaked photos" for years. I think a company like Apple would be able to keep things secret until the announcement day if they really want to.
Two observations:
- When it comes to dummies, genuine schematics and renders from some factory floor, etc., it's a feature, not a bug. We're long past the days when Apple could make a splash with designs like the iPhone 4 or 5, as premium phones just look like… rounded slabs of metal and glass, with Apple's offerings just featuring especially nice, smoothed out roundrects, finishes, etc., and – sad and unexciting as it may be for many here – there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's a matter of perspective.
Dummies don't really provide much insight into the latter, but they do inform case manufacturers, both big-brand and off-brand ones, on the specs they need to match, and I believe Apple doesn't really want to go after those, as they'd be killing one of their golden geese. It's nigh impossible to let them have their way and keep the general shapes of next year's iPhones a secret.
- I can see from your profile that you've joined in 2012, but a “you must be new here” joke would still be apropos. 😂
Now, in all seriousness and with all due respect, you've got it the other way around… Old, small, scruffy Apple (not at all even the one you knew from all the way back in 2012, assuming that's when you started following Apple's inner workings in earnest – I've been on MR and using iPods since 2004 and using Macs since late 2003, for reference, so we're talking mid-Jobs'-second-tenure, semi-ancient Apple history here) could indeed keep these things a secret and maybe even considerably allow some very select case manufacturers (even for MacBooks/PowerBooks, before the iPod was a thing, but also for iPods, of course) to have access to dummies under NDA and be able to police compliance therewith.
As for current, gigantic Apple, manufacturing phones at the scale they've been doing it for almost two decades? Not in a million years… Most likely, these dummies were made from leaked case and button (if not full) schematics, maybe even reverse-engineered from OEM Apple case manufacturers (cases being a product which, I'm also guessing, they also manufacture in the millions), and as they're just some chunks of roughly CNC'ed metal, it might be hard for Apple to know exactly where they leaked from or for them to actually sue those who made them.
So… answering your musings, the TL;DR is: they likely don't even want to, but they also definitely couldn't even if they did want to. They
will go after actual device leakers, though (remember
that infamous iPhone 4 prototype that was lost and then stolen? That was
not the last time Apple went after prototype leakers…), as they do like to keep their exact colourways and finishes a bit of an open mystery, and obviously want to keep their internal pre-release iOS builds, field testing software and PVT (but also DVT and EVT) prototype specs, well,
internal.
Every single year there are descriptions floating around, but as for actual, colour-calibrated photos and videos of the real phones (the ancient equivalent of which, way back when during the potato-camera years, being the quintessential, jokingly called “elevator shot”)…? Have you seen those, other than those last-minute leaks when they are actually filtering out to the distribution chain? There's indeed the veeery occasional and momentous device leak weeks or months in advance, and sometimes even the odd part a year or two even before the device it belongs to is confirmed in the first place, but nope, on all the other “boring years” it's mostly just renders (made by third parties, from descriptions, case and/or dummy leaks, etc.).
