Charles Moore sorts out the conflicting reports about the iPhone 5 release date.
When it comes to the iPhone 5 release date, who are you going to believe? U.S. sources and Wall St. say it will come in late summer/early fall. Asian sources say the iPhone 5 is on track for June. How can you sort it all out? Charles Moore explains:
I’ve been following Apple new product releases attentively for nearly 20 years now, and I’ve concluded that the only certainty about them is that nothing is certain until the official announcement. Consequently, I think the best policy is to be interested, but not too impatient, or put much serious stock in rumors.
And so it is with the iPhone 5. Everyone knows it’s coming, but no one, except Steve Jobs and his coterie of closest confidants knows when. Indeed, it’s possible that even the Cupertino inner circle doesn’t yet know the precise release date, which may be partly contingent on renewed supplies of components that had been sourced in Japan prior to the earthquake/tsunami disaster.
Until about a month ago, it had been widely anticipated that Apple would introduce the iPhone 5 at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference that starts June 6 at Moscone West in San Francisco. This seemed a relatively safe guess based on past history, since iPhone releases and updates have been a tradition (if you can call anything that’s only been in place since 2008 traditional) at the WWDC over the past few years. However, this year maybe not so much.
As noted, about a month ago, some of the rumor mills began pulling in their horns a bit and suggesting that the iPhone 5 might be might not be ready in time for the WWDC after all, and that its release date might be pushed back until late summer or even into October or November. In any case, the arrivedat general consensus for the past couple of weeks has been pretty much that the iPhone 5 won’t be coming in June, especially after Apple posted a press release on March 28 saying that at this years five-day conference Apple will unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS, including demonstrations of the new kinds of apps developers can build using Apples advanced frameworks, and more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers.
At this years conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS, Philip Schiller, Apples senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing commented in the release. If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.
Nothing on the agenda about the iPhone 5 or any other hardware. That’s more unequivocal than Apple usually gets about conforming or denying major product releases and events. the inference I draw from it is a pretty categorical no iPhone or any other major hardware announcements at the WWDC, although it’s not completely beyond the realm of possibility, however remote, that Steve Jobs might be planning one of his patented one more thing surprise announcements in a keynote. I wouldn’t bet on it though, and it’s more likely that the ailing Mr. Jobs might not even show up at the conference.
However, on Tuesday, several news sites linked to a report on the Korean site ETNews.co.kr, declaring that Steve Jobs had confirmed a direct public iPhone 5 release coming at an Apple special event during the 4th week of June depending on how you parse the translation. My Korean is non-existant, and even Google Translate seemed to have difficulty producing coherent prose from the report. you can check it out for yourself here: http://bit.ly/gzTxtE
Anyway, the rumor mills cranked up, even though it would be peculiar, to say the least, for Apple to “confirm” a release date for the iPhone 5 to a Korean Website before announcing it in the U.S. In counterpoint, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, a former MacCentral and Macworld staffer who is well-connected in the Apple orbit, posted a categorical rebuttal, declaring that his sources tell him that rumors of an iPhone 5 release at the end of June are completely false.
I have no insider insights to relate, but based on experience and deduction, I’m in Jim Dalrymple’s camp on this one. Speculating about unreleased Apple products is fun, and Oriental news vendors, being closer to and better connected with the actual production sites, are often sources of leaked information about forthcoming Apple hardware that turns out to have been accurate, or at least in the ballpark, but they’ve also been known to be spectacularly wrong at times, and it’s prudent to take anything they report about unreleased Apple products with a big grain of salt.
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