Know Your Mobile has trotted out August 7th as their roulette number for the iPhone 5 announcement, citing “reliable sources.”
As the summer rolls on in the northern hemisphere, we’re bound to get an increasing number of moonshot guesses and purported announcement date claims for the iPhone 5. You’ll recall that last summer, CNET UK infamously staked its reputation on the iPhone 5 being released on a specific day in September. We now have our first post-WWDC iPhone 5 announcement date guess.
The claim comes from Know Your Mobile, who tells us the following:
“Apple will announce the iPhone 5 on August 7, Know Your Mobile can exclusively reveal.
A reliable industry source who wishes to remain anonymous revealed to Know Your Mobile that Apple’s highly-anticipated and much-rumoured iPhone 5 will be launched via a keynote speech on August 7.”
Sure! Ok! Let’s go with that! August 7th seems as good of a date as any, right?
Know Your Mobile substantiates the logic of their source’s claim thusly: “The new date correlates with reports from earlier in the month the iPhone 5's release had been brought forward from October to August.” I’m about to sound a lot like John Cox here, but basically what Know Your Mobile is stating is that, because some other sources claimed that August would be the announcement month for the iPhone 5, that August 7th must be a viable release date. After all, it’s on a Tuesday.
Look at it this way: if one sincerely believes that Apple will release its most important product in the month that a large portion of people in the northern hemisphere are spending their hard-earned money on vacations (or “holidays” as some like to call them), then hey, you’ve got a 1 in 31 chance of guessing the day correctly. There are 31 days in August, right?
“30 days has September,
April, June, and November….”
All kidding aside, I’ve always found the prospect of an August announcement to be a relatively unlikely announcement month, for the above mentioned reason, as well as the fact that, most likely, most of the executives at Cupertino are probably on vacation. At the very least, if Apple was dead set on announcing the iPhone 5 in August, it would more likely be at the end of the month, when more people are coming back from vacation in anticipation of the school year. That way, the actual product launch would probably take place in mid to late September. August 7th, however, would put the product launch just ahead of the big Labor Day weekend, when many Americans are vacationing.
Also, will we have iOS 6 ready to go by August 7th?
From everything I’ve read, the iOS 6 golden master is expected in September. I had argued that, if Apple had announced the iPhone 5 at the WWDC, they could have theoretically released it with iOS 5.2, and did an OTA update of iOS 6 at the end of the summer when it was ready. But they didn’t do that, obviously because it’s important for Apple to ship new iPhones with new iOSs. Thus, if iOS 6 is on track for September, how it Apple going to announce the iPhone 5 on August 7th?
For as much as holding out hope for the iPhone 5 to be announced at the WWDC may seem to have been myopic in hindsight, there was much more credence to that claim, since Apple did have a track record of announcing iPhones at the WWDC, and at least June 11th was a day where we knew there was an Apple event scheduled. August 7th is just a day — a day like any other day between now and the day that the iPhone 5 is finally announced.
Is it possible? Yes. Probable? Not so much.
As the summer rolls on in the northern hemisphere, we’re bound to get an increasing number of moonshot guesses and purported announcement date claims for the iPhone 5. You’ll recall that last summer, CNET UK infamously staked its reputation on the iPhone 5 being released on a specific day in September. We now have our first post-WWDC iPhone 5 announcement date guess.
The claim comes from Know Your Mobile, who tells us the following:
“Apple will announce the iPhone 5 on August 7, Know Your Mobile can exclusively reveal.
A reliable industry source who wishes to remain anonymous revealed to Know Your Mobile that Apple’s highly-anticipated and much-rumoured iPhone 5 will be launched via a keynote speech on August 7.”
Sure! Ok! Let’s go with that! August 7th seems as good of a date as any, right?
Know Your Mobile substantiates the logic of their source’s claim thusly: “The new date correlates with reports from earlier in the month the iPhone 5's release had been brought forward from October to August.” I’m about to sound a lot like John Cox here, but basically what Know Your Mobile is stating is that, because some other sources claimed that August would be the announcement month for the iPhone 5, that August 7th must be a viable release date. After all, it’s on a Tuesday.
Look at it this way: if one sincerely believes that Apple will release its most important product in the month that a large portion of people in the northern hemisphere are spending their hard-earned money on vacations (or “holidays” as some like to call them), then hey, you’ve got a 1 in 31 chance of guessing the day correctly. There are 31 days in August, right?
“30 days has September,
April, June, and November….”
All kidding aside, I’ve always found the prospect of an August announcement to be a relatively unlikely announcement month, for the above mentioned reason, as well as the fact that, most likely, most of the executives at Cupertino are probably on vacation. At the very least, if Apple was dead set on announcing the iPhone 5 in August, it would more likely be at the end of the month, when more people are coming back from vacation in anticipation of the school year. That way, the actual product launch would probably take place in mid to late September. August 7th, however, would put the product launch just ahead of the big Labor Day weekend, when many Americans are vacationing.
Also, will we have iOS 6 ready to go by August 7th?
From everything I’ve read, the iOS 6 golden master is expected in September. I had argued that, if Apple had announced the iPhone 5 at the WWDC, they could have theoretically released it with iOS 5.2, and did an OTA update of iOS 6 at the end of the summer when it was ready. But they didn’t do that, obviously because it’s important for Apple to ship new iPhones with new iOSs. Thus, if iOS 6 is on track for September, how it Apple going to announce the iPhone 5 on August 7th?
For as much as holding out hope for the iPhone 5 to be announced at the WWDC may seem to have been myopic in hindsight, there was much more credence to that claim, since Apple did have a track record of announcing iPhones at the WWDC, and at least June 11th was a day where we knew there was an Apple event scheduled. August 7th is just a day — a day like any other day between now and the day that the iPhone 5 is finally announced.
Is it possible? Yes. Probable? Not so much.
