Every iPhone until the iPhone 4S has come out in either June or July. For reasons we may never come to understand, today’s iPhone, the iPhone 4S, came out in October. That thew a lot of people off, and we have numbers to prove that: iPhone sales in Apple’s fiscal Q4 2011 came in at just 17.07 million units, which is 3.27 million fewer than in the previous quarter. We all know what happened though. Apple announced and shipped the iPhone 4S and ended up selling 37 million iPhones during the last three months of 2011. So now the question on everyone’s mind is when will Apple ship the next iPhone? According to the Japanese website Macotakara, the iPhone 5 will land in either September or October, and every iPhone after that will follow the same fall schedule. That actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it, since people are more willing to spend money during the holiday shopping season than they are in the summer time.
Anyway, what do we know about the iPhone 5? Not much. It’s not going to look the iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S, that’s for sure. Some folks say it’ll have a 4 inch screen, but we don’t have any evidence to support that. We do know that whatever processor ends up in the iPad 3 will likely show up in the iPhone 5, but we don’t have any information on that processor as of right now. We think it’s going to be a 32 nanometer dual core chip with a new souped up graphics processor, but that’s just speculation on our part.
Later this month at Mobile World Congress in Spain we’re going to see a bunch of companies announce new hardware. Those devices will no doubt be compared to the iPhone 4S. When those devices eventually ship in the summer time, people will say to themselves “well, the iPhone 5 is just two to three months away”. Said people buy an iPhone in October, and then four months later in February new hardware will be shown off, it will be compared with this new iPhone, and the circle never ends.
Sounds like a genius plot.