Monday, 1 August 2011

Day 56: signs say 24 day iPhone 5 release date cycle on September 9th

It’s Day Fifty-Six since Apple failed in its first opportunity to assign an iPhone 5 release date, and now the second boat in the long line of expected iPhone 5 release dates has officially sunk. Scratch July off the wall, as the month ended today without so much as a whiff. September is now the default. But August still lives, if barely, for the simple reason that there are another thirty days in the month after today and Apple has shown that it only needs a twenty-four day headstart to go from zero to sixty in terms of breaking radio silence and eventually getting the new iPhone to market. That precedent was established last year with the iPhone 4: the company announced a mystery press conference (which wasn’t much of a mystery) to be held in seven days, and upon revealing the new iPhone that day, set a release date another seventeen days into the future. That means Apple can still get the iPhone 5 to market in this new month, but according to its own track record, must set the wheels in motion quickly.That, however, puts Apple in the position of putting the iPhone 5 on sale just before Labor Day. That’s not sound strategy, as it’s a time when many people are still traveling on their summer vacations while others, who are planning to head out on vacation during the three day weekend, are looking to keep cash in their wallets so they can blow it on the trip. Big movies are still premiering, and it’s just not the right time for Apple to be asking the public to pay attention long enough for the iPhone 5 to sink in. Sure, PriceGrabber and ChangeWave claim that a third to a half of the entire population already plans to buy an iPhone 5 when it comes out. But Apple trying to pull off that launch at an inopportune late-summer timeframe makes less sense than simply waiting until after Labor Day in order to launch the iPhone 5. That leaves two scenarios, and neither will sound exciting to those who were hoping to get their hands on the new iPhone in August…

The first is that the iPhone 5 press conference takes place in mid August. That means Apple begins trying to get its message out the door during that tough time when people are still on vacation physically and mentally, but the release date itself comes after Labor Day and ends up being Friday, September 9th. Somewhere in Apple’s hive collective, Friday has been determined to be the ideal day of the week for launching a retail hardware product, and the 9th happens to be the first Friday after the holiday. But this scenario assumes Apple is in a hurry to get the iPhone 5 to market after having so thoroughly blown past the one year anniversary of the iPhone 4 launch, which happened in late June.
The other gameplan sees Apple bypassing the August doldrums altogether and instead waiting to introduce the iPhone 5 at its time-honored early September press conference. These are often on Tuesdays, but sometimes on a Wednesday. And with Monday the 5th being a holiday, that marks September 7th as the press event date, with the invites going out around the last day of August. Factor in Apple’s seventeen day cycle from introduction to on-sale, and the 24th would then be the launch date, if of course it weren’t a Saturday. So instead September 23rd becomes the late iPhone 5 release date, if indeed September 9th can be counted as the early one.
That’s if an extra two weeks, after having waited nearly fifteen months from the start of the iPhone 5 lifecycle, really matters to you. The issue of just why the iPhone 5 is arriving so much later in the calendar year than usual is akin to the location of the body of Jimmy Hoffa: everyone has their pet theory, and plenty of them sound plausible, but no one has any real evidence to back it up. As it stands, the iPhone 5 operating system known as iOS 5 is on its fourth developer beta, which means it’s close enough to ready that it can’t likely be launched just as soon as the iPhone 5 itself is ready. From there it’s simply a matter of how much of a hurry Apple itself is in to deliver its new baby, after having taken nearly a year and a quarter to bring the iPhone 5 to term and having blown through its due date so long ago that no one is quite sure what’s going on now. Got your own guess as to when the iPhone 5 will see its release date? Share it in the comments section below. And while you’re at it, if you happen to know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried… Here’s more on the iPhone 5.

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