The truth about the iPhone 5 and iPad 3

Every day, it seems, there’s a new rumor about the “iPhone 5” or “iPad 3.” Some purport to be based on information from carriers or component suppliers. Others are clearly inventions by enthusiast bloggers who have learned they can get an audience by constantly making stuff up. The Web has no memory, it seems, so the false prophets of Apple’s plans get away with purveying their fiction. Even respectable publications that won’t run the rumors as news instead compile “rumor roundups” to have their cake and eat it too. They’re fooling only themselves about the fact they too are willing and eager to misrepresent fiction as news.

The crescendo of iPhone 5 and iPad 3 rumors is only getting more intense as the fall release of iOS 5 approaches. It’s a safe bet that Apple will announce an updated iPhone at the same time, since it skipped its usual July iPhone refresh this year and hinted strongly in its earnings call last month that a new iPhone was on its way.

For a while this winter, the rumor chatter focused on an “iPhone Nano,” a smaller, cheaper iPhone to be built from older-era iPhone parts (never mind they aren’t small enough), then right before the March iPad 2 release, the rumors changed to whether the next iPhone would be a major redesign or an improved version of the iPhone 4. Since spring, they’ve been focused mainly on when the next iPhone will ship. It’s been fun, in a sick way, to watch the same bloggers and “reporters” repeatedly find obscure analysts or play with tea leaves to justify the latest rumored release date, which has bounced among August, September, and October, changing every couple weeks based on the latest “fact.”

I keep waiting now for some blogger to quote analyst Alan Smithee of Motionless Consulting’s assurance that the iPad 2ZG will launch on Aug. 15, sporting antigravity emitters to give it an effective weight of zero pounds and to allow its use anywhere without a surface or the need to hold it in one hand and hunt-and-tap with the other.

How Apple has encouraged the rumors If you’re thinking of buying an iPhone or iPad, you of course don’t want to buy one with a new, improved version right around the corner. The problem is, when will we get to that corner? Apple has historically kept to a regular schedule on its product updates, so it was easy to identify when you were bearing near that point: iPhones and iOS in July or August, iPods in September or October, iPads in March or April, MacBooks in spring, MacBook Airs in the fall.

But Apple has begun to deviate a bit from that regularity, with the new MacBook Air released in July of this year and the next-version iPhone apparently pushed back until fall (to coincide with the release of iOS 5 and iCloud, apparently — or maybe due to the supplier aftereffects of the Japanese earthquake this spring).

Those exceptions fuel the rumors that the iPad 3 (sometimes called the iPad Pro by the rumormongers) will be released this fall, for the holiday shopping season — just eight months after Apple released the iPad 2. Only Apple knows for sure, but the move is so unlike Apple that I just can’t credit it. Unlike most other PC and mobile device makers, Apple doesn’t create products for a shelf life of a few months. If you walked into a Best Buy today to look at Android devices, for example, the models available will differ greatly from what you would see in October, even though under their skins they’re basically all the same.

Apple’s strategy is to make a handful of products that are so superior they last in the market for a year or more. I just don’t see Apple changing such a strategy — especially when its contrarian approach has helped it become the No. 1 smartphone and tablet maker in the world, while all the fashionista manufacturers find themselves increasingly ignored. I can see Apple bumping up specs such as memory capacity or processor speed in between major design releases — it does that on the Mac already from time to time — but not deliver an all-new design that quickly.

Of course, that strategy is why people are so concerned about not buying an iPhone or iPad right before the next model is out: They expect the difference to be significant and meaningful. Still, Apple has taken great care to ensure its new OS works on two generations of previous models, and iOS is where most of the everyday value comes in the iPhone and iPad. An iPhone 4 running iOS 5 will be a damned good product, even after the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S or whatever it will be comes out. (I’m betting not an an all-new design but a thinner, lighter, faster version of the iPhone 4, much as the 3G S was of the iPhone 3G.) Contrast that to RIM’s orphaning its users when BlackBerry OS 6 came out last year and again this year with BlackBerry OS 7 or to the incomprehensible patchwork of versions and update schedules that plagues the Android world.

What you can rely on instead of rumors You can’t rely on the rumors on the Web to determine your purchase timing. Nearly everything rumored turns out to be false. Consider these probably false rumors about the iPad 2 as examples:

• It would have the high-res Retina display that debuted with the iPhone 4. I said last November that was unlikely, and in fact it didn’t happen.
• It would have a USB port — never mind Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s consistent aversion to putting holes in his products’ cases.
• It would have a universal CDMA/GSM radio — though there are signs in the iPad 2’s hardware that Apple is moving in this direction, so it’s possible for the next iPhone or iPad or the versions after that.
• There would be a 7-inch version — never mind that Jobs excoriated the whole concept; the bloggers at that period were all gaga over the original Samsung Galaxy Tab, an awkward 7-inch tablet that proved Jobs was right.
• It would run on the new LTE network from Verizon Wireless — even though that network’s actual deployment is tiny and spotty and the LTE radio components not yet proven; at some point, of course, Apple will support LTE.

The accurate rumors tend to come from a few sources — the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and, to a lesser extent, Boy Genius Report — in a short time before Apple announces the real thing. Pay no mind to the rest — and maybe ask if you can trust anything they say. After all, these are the same sites that fell for that “Internet Explorer users have low IQs” hoax because they didn’t bother to check to see if the company issuing the “study” was real.

One clue you can use reliably is to watch the inventory levels at the Apple Store. When a product’s availability starts to move from 24 hours or a few days to several weeks, that’s a safe bet that Apple is letting its inventory run out to make room for a new model. In fact, this is the only repeatably accurate signal of a new version’s imminent release.

This article, “The truth about the iPhone 5 and iPad 3,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.