Boy Genius Report is a hit and miss when it comes to Apple predictions and today the publication’s editor Jonathan Geller posted a story which essentially recycles a bunch of separate rumors concerning the next iPhone. According to the author, final production of the iPhone 5 will start later this summer, which is what both the know-it-all Wall Street Journal and reliable Japanese blog Macotakara heard previously…
In his exclusive report base on “trusted sources” (aren’t they always?), Geller says The Wall Street Journal and Macotakara weren’t quite right and educates us a bit on Apple’s manufacturing patterns:
Apple goes through multiple stages before a product is manufactured, and two of these include the “engineering verification test” stage and the “design verification test” phase. Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone is currently in the EVT3 stage, the third revision of the engineering test stage, and has not yet entered the DVT stage.
According to Geller, “that’s all that is happening at this point in time”, adding that “the final version of Apple’s next iPhone — the one that you will buy — has not started production yet”.
Also, this:
Additionally, we have confirmation that the units Apple is currently testing have 1GB of RAM, doubled from the iPhone 4S’s 512MB, and integrated 4G LTE radios. We can also confirm that NFC hardware is present in the phones as well. We’re expecting Apple’s new iPhone to be released at the end of September or early October.
Note that Geller also heard from “trusted sources” that Apple would release a software development kit for the Apple TV at WWDC, in addition to launching feature-complete Apple TV software for iTV, neither of which had come true.
I kinda was hoping Apple would increase RAM on the next iPhone for smoother multitasking and better all-round performance. The new iPad has 1GB of RAM, but the iPhone 4S has only 512MB RAM (here’s why). As you know, Samsung’s Galaxy SIII has a whooping 2GB of RAM, depending on model.
We first heard late last month that iPhone prototypes have NFC chips and antenna. As for 4G LTE, we found out back in March via code hooks in iOS 5.1 that the next iPhone would support high-speed Long Term Evolution (LTE) fourth-generation cellular networks.
Likewise, iOS 6 builds hold more information about a potential Ax-series silicon variant for the device, including an ARM S5L8950X application processor with 1GB RAM and a yet unknown SGX543 GPU variant.
What do you guys make of this?