When the Verizon iPhone was launched, Apple went on record saying that they did not think LTE or 4G was a good fit right now, in that the first-gen chips were still too big and power efficient to make sense.
Will we see an iPhone 4G in September, though? It doesn’t seem likely. Forbes is reporting that the chips required to produce well-designed LTE iPhones simply won’t be around until late in the year at the earliest… and possibly not until 2012.
At yesterday’s earnings call, Apple COO Tim Cook said: “The first generation of LTE chip-sets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make.”
According to Will Strauss, president of wireless chip tracker Forward Concepts, Cook’s right… and those chips are a ways away.
“They’re right that there’s nothing out there that fits the bill, and likely nothing will until the fourth quarter of this year,” said Strauss.
That means that unless Apple puts off the iPhone 5 until the end of the year, we shouldn’t expect a true 4G iPhone until 2012, at least using LTE.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “Don’t Expect An iPhone 4G/LTE Until 2012 Says Expert”
“first-gen chips were still too big and power efficient to make sense”
Yes, God forbid we have efficient chips in a mobile device. The battery might last too long, and then it would be total chaos. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!
He *must* mean “power draining.”
But yeah, reading it as “Power efficient” just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
I guess ill start looking at an Android 4G phone with an 8 megapixel camera & video chat capabilities & not having to look around for wifi…Apple was bound to lose the race sooner or later. They had a great run for the past several years though!
Nothing lasts forever…
smh