The stars seem to be aligning for an LTE iPhone in 2012. Friday, Sprint announced it plans to offer wireless 4G service “by the middle of 2012” with the faster wireless network complete by the end of 2013. This bolsters reports earlier this week that thinner LTE chips for the iPhone could be ready by the third quarter of next year.
The Reuters’ report cites a “top executive” at Sprint. Dan Hesse, CEO of the No. 3 U.S. carrier, said the iPhone 4S will be “quite accretive,” accounting lingo for mucho profitability. Sprint reportedly bought $20 billion worth of iPhones in a four-year plan aimed at competing against rivals AT&T and Verizon, operators who also offer the Apple smartphone.
Although he did not provide specifics about just how much profit the iPhone could pull into the carrier, Friday marks the first day when consumers could pre-order the iPhone 4S from Sprint.
Earlier this week, a report surfaced suggesting Apple is waiting until later in 2012 to introduce the “iPhone 5.” First generation LTE chips were too bulky to include in the just-released iPhone 4S, but chipmaker Qualcomm is expected to have a slimmer design ready for the third-quarter of 2012, according to various reports.
The absence of 4G in the iPhone 4S led some consumers to be disappointed by the Apple announcement, prompting a raft of Wall Street analysts to reassure the post-Steve Jobs tech company would remain faithful to its co-founder.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
23 responses to “Is Sprint Prepping LTE For 2012’s iPhone 5? Massive Launch Suggests Yes”
Is this a joke? I pre-ordered an iPhone 4S. If a new iPhone comes out next mid-year, I swear, someone’s going to die.
Like Phil Schiller said during tuesdays keynote, the iPhone 4S will have uplink speeds of up to 5.8 mbps and downlink of up to 14.4 mbps which is comparable to other phones 4G performance so I don’t mind waiting until 2012 for a 4G iPhone 5 at all :-)
Apple makes a new phone every year. People should know this already.
I agree, the tech world should stop bringing out new devices! Those greedy bastards!!
This is total garbage, there will be no iPhone 5, the next phone will be the iPhone 6 and it will be released next fall after months of iOS6 beta testing. I think we are deep enough into iOS and iPhone releases to know how this works.
Why would they go from 4 to 6?
Geezus F#$)(*ing eh… back at the iPhone 5 again? Do we have to live through another year of this?
How about let Sprint upgrade their network because they need to be competitive. If there is an iPhone 5 and it gets LTE, it will be amazing… but thats beside the point and not for another 12 months… between now and then there will probably be 1000 Android and Windows phones to blog about. (ok so we’re sick of those too)
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Because it would be the 6th generation of the iPhone…..just like iPhone 4. The journalists here need to take a quick look at why they are writing.
Because the 4S is really the 5th iphone, and the iphone 5 next year would really be the 6th gen iphone. They kinda screwed up the naming with the whole S series after naming the iphone 3G which was really the second device. watevs
people are dumb is why…but somethings telling me the ipad 3 will come out in June and take on the iphones old schedule. This will give more time to make those retina displays in mass and add a little more time for component cost to come down. Also they will have the lower power LTE chips for the ipad in time and sprint will have their “new” 4G up. The iphone will stay on the fall schedule as the few months off will allow it to not eat into ipad sales and give time for engineers to tweak ipad hardware to run at lower power and temp in the iphone. On my analyst ish!
I angry too! I bought a new car in 2004 and they keep coming out with newer models.