With the New iPad ‘3’ out of the way, all eyes are now on Apple to announce the iPhone 5. While in the past it was safe to assume that the next-generation iPhone models would launch during the summer at WWDC, last year’s delayed release of the iPhone 4S has complicated things.
iPhone 5 release date sometime in October only?
Now a recent quarterly earnings call by Qualcomm has hinted what we’ve all feared, a delayed iPhone 5 release date. According to the report, particular LTE chipsets are seeing a strain in supply at the moment which Qualcomm’s Chief Executive Paul Jacobs suggests is because “demand went so far ahead of availability that we’ve decided to start spending more money to get more supply as soon as possible.”
Piper Jaffray’s analyst Gene Munster’s has “collectively strewn” the reports into a date and it looks like we maybe seeing an October release date once again. As Munster reports, “QCOM will likely support an Apple iPhone launch in October. Based on our checks, we believe the design win momentum of QCOM’s 28nm products has been exceptionally strong and a 28nm LTE baseband is likely designed into the next iPhone. … Based on the increased capital spending this year from TSMC and QCOM’s efforts over the last quarter to port its 28nm designs to UMC and probably Global Foundries, we think QCOM will have the capacity to support a Q4 LTE iPhone 5 launch.”
Now this should not come as a big surprise given that the iPhone 4S launched in October as well. However we were hoping that it was a once-off delay that would not be repeated again. Nevertheless, like all reports from analysts, we suggest taking it with a grain of salt. There’s still hope for a summer release for the iPhone 5, the odds just aren’t that great.
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