The same shadowy figured which can’t decide whether the
iPhone 5 is really coming this summer have now posited that even if it does, Apple’s next-gen iOS 5 operating system may not immediately come along for the ride.
And this comes at a time when there’s increasing speculation that with the iPad 2 seemingly less than the grand revolution Apple must have originally envisioned, there just might be an iPad 3 coming before year’s end. Put two and two together, and the swamp monsters might as well be claiming that iOS 5 is in fact going to be timed for a late 2011 release – alongside the third generation
iPad. With Apple’s nearly religious penchant for sticking with its annual calendar updates, common sense says it’s all a bunch of hooey; the
iPhone 5 and iOS 5 will debut in the summer, with whatever features Apple has ready by then; more grand ambitions will simply be shelved it the calendar doesn’t line up. And the iPad 3 will be a March 2012 affair. But it does make one wonder… what if this particular wildcard posited by the shadowy figures just happens to be accurate? The implications would be, at the least, intriguing.
The intrigue starts with the fact that there’s only so much operating system development which can be done a phone. iOS 4 is arguably all the
iPhone needs for now, with features finding their way in on the 4.x releases just as surely as they eventually would with iOS 5. So the
iPhone 5 could launch with iOS 4.5 and few would decline to purchase it (or enjoy it) as a result. But the iPad is a different beast. While it’s still a semi-tethered spoke in Apple’s computer-centric wheel, Steve Jobs has made it clear that he eventually envisions the iPad as the mainstream computer of the future; traditional computers like the Mac and PC would be only for power users. In terms of being less of a “big ten
inch iPhone” and more of a computer replacement, the iPad still has a long way to go. The iPad 2 gained a number of nice hardware specs, but doesn’t really come any closer to becoming a true “computer” than its predecessor did. And the iPad 3 can gain all the new specs its wants, but it’ll really come down to the on-screen environment, specifically the sophistication of the operating system itself as well as the kind of sophistication it allows third party developers to bring to the table. The notion that iOS 5 would go hand in hand with the iPad 3 would be an intriguing shift on Apple’s part, as the company has previously released new versions of iOS at the time a new iPhone was ready. Such an iPad-centric shift for iOS would signal that Apple now sees the iPad as a more vital part of the equation than the
iPhone – or else that the
iPhone experience has evolved such that it’s time to put more chips down on the iPad side of the table. It would also explain why in the heck Apple would be rolling out an iPad 3 in the same calendar year as the iPad 2 rollout.
But that’s all speculation into what Apple’s motives might be
if anything the swamp monsters are claiming about the products involved is even true. And we’ve learned such claims are always a crapshoot at best. Smart money says the
iPhone 5, iOS 5, and iPad 3 will arrive when they’re supposed to, according to Apple’s well entrenched calendar. But if the
iPhone 5 does arrive this summer without iOS 5 in tow, it might be time to revisit the validity of the foggy-bottom claims. Here’s more on the
iPhone 5.
Apple could be set to offer a double whammy of smartphone goodness this year, with news that the Cupertino massive is to launch two versions of the iPhone5.
