The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed |
| Posted: 04 Aug 2011 10:33 PM PDT
This week a gaggle of mainstream tech and finance journals and blogs have been riffing on a note to clients by Jefferies & Co. banking sector market analyst and tech-sector watcher Peter Misek Analyst entitled “One to Rule Them All: iOS and OS X Roadmaps to Merge.” The main thrust of Misek’s screed is what he contends is an Apple strategy To Merge the iOS with OS X into a single platform for supporting apps and cloud services in 2012 concurrent with the projected release of quad-core, 64-Bit ARM A6 processor silicon that will be used not only in iPads and iPhones, but also Apple’s Macs — with the MacBook Air first up. Misek’s timeline for the A6 rollout would see the new in-house designed CPU debuting in the iPad 3 during Q1 2012, and the A6 powered iPhone 5 next summer (or at WWDC?), and the the Macbook Air switching to A6 processors in the second half of 2012, or in early 2013, and with the iOS and Mac OS X merger into one operating system finally consummated by 2016. He thinks that 64-bit ARM architecture will be key for Apple to complete an operating system merger, which is plausible given that OS X 10.7 Lion is already 64-bit only. On the other hand, currently iPhones and iPads run on 32-bit ARM chips while Apple’s Mac PCs run on Intel x86 processors. However, the report says “Apple is ready to start sampling the A6 quad-core app processor and will be the first such multi-device platform capable of PC-like strength,” so the wheels of this transition appear to be in motion. In the meantime, Misek belongs to the school of thought that the new iPhone product that’s being ramped up for release in the late summer or the fall will be an A5 powered iPhone 4S. Now, this constellation of predictions would be easy to dismiss if they were coming from some fly-by-night smalltime blog, but coming from a respected analyst at a well established and reputable firm like Jefferies & Co., one is obliged to take notice and give it careful consideration. Personally, I find the prediction that Apple is fixing to merge the IOS with OS X completely plausible, and in fact I began predicting that Apple would eventually do so early last year, after the astonishing success of the iPad and iPad 2. However, the idea that Apple would actually wait until next summer to release an iPhone 5 is pretty hard to swallow, and based on fan sentiment vigorously expressed on this blog and elsewhere, the company would be risking a lot of backlash if all it’s released over the next couple of months turns out to be a tarted up iPhone 4 with a P5 processor, a somewhat larger display, an 8 megapixel camera and a few other tweaks. Likely to be better-received is a report from Digitimes’ Monica Chen and Adam Hwang that Taiwan’s Pegatron Technology has landed orders for 10 million units of iPhone 5 to become Apple second iPhone subcontractor, with shipments to begin in September, according to unnamed industry sources. In other news, 9To5Mac reports that A tipster at an Orange UK store in London has let them know that the carrier has told employees the iPhone 3GS is no longer available, that according to several sources in different countries, iPhone 3GS stock has been quickly tightening with few or no shipments coming through the pipeline to some regions, and according to a source at one popular international carrier, the iPhone 3GS has disappeared from the stock database altogether, while an accurate source at a major U.S. based iPhone reseller reports that iPhone 3GS stock is significantly lower than usual. The disappearance of the iPhone 3GS would seem logical if Apple opts to keep the current specification iPhone 4 in production as its entry-level handset after the new mainstream iPhone offering is revealed, whatever it turns out to be called. For more on Peter Misek’s Jefferies & Co. report predictions, check out the reports at the following URLs below: http://bit.ly/rv1pHs |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The iPhone 5 News Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
