Going against The New York Times and nearly every other rumor we’ve heard in the last few months, Wedge Partners told investors today that there is only one iPhone coming this Fall.
Like the rest of us, analyst Brian Blair believes that Apple will hold a special event between September 28 and October 5 to unveil several new products to the world. Except he thinks that only one of those products will be an iPhone…
Blair issued a note to investors this morning, claiming that they [Wedge Partners] are only expecting one smartphone from the Cupertino company this year. On top of that, they believe it will only be a modest upgrade from its predecessor.
BGR provides an excerpt from the note:
“We expect the focus of the new iPhone will be iOS 5, a speedier A5 processor and a higher resolution 8 MP camera with a small possibility of a larger 4 inch screen,” Blair wrote. “We believe the casing will be largely similar to the iPhone with some particular modifications to the antennae [sic]. We don’t expect a second, dramatically different iPhone to accompany this as we don’t think Apple needs to have 3 models in the market to address the high end, mid-tier, and low end since the iPhone 4 (with memory lowered to 8GB) will drop to $99 and effectively attack those markets.”
The analyst goes on to question how Apple would be able sell an iPhone 4 with an A5 processor at a lower price, saying that it would have to come in under $100 to be effective. He obviously hasn’t heard of the Tim Cook effect.
I’ll admit, it is strange that we haven’t seen any sign of a significantly redesign handset by way of leaked components. So far, all of the purported next-generation parts that have surfaced look very similar to those of an iPhone 4.
But what about all of those silicon cases we’ve been seeing since late July? Where do they fit into all of this? And why would Apple delay its iPhone launch nearly 4 months if they were only making minor changes? Hopefully we’ll find out soon.
Will we really only see one model of the iPhone this Fall?