Apple will unveil the iPhone 5 on September 12th. Pre-orders are expected to begin the same day. Industry experts agree that this year’s model is the most anticipated iPhone release yet, and Apple is expected to enjoy record sales this holiday season. You’re probably itching to see what Apple has up its sleeve this time, especially if you’re coming off a two-year carrier contract with the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4S was announced on October 4th, 2011. Despite all of its new features and improvements, the 4S didn’t really fulfill all of the “iPhone 5” rumors that predicted a totally new form factor, larger display, 4G, etc. For that reason, the 4S triggered some disappointment among Apple fans.

Now it’s 2012 and Apple is expected to finally unveil the redesigned iPhone 5 we’ve all been waiting for. In Cult of Mac’s rumor roundup, we examine everything we think we know about the iPhone 5.

The Apple Store goes down for many reasons throughout any given month, and not all of them mean big updates, but the fact that it went down four and a half hours before Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement event pretty much guarantees we’re going to see sweeping changes and awesome new products when it goes back up, including the iPhone 5, the new iPod touch, new Lightning adapters, new Earpods, and maybe, just maybe, new iMacs and a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro?

Who knows? What do you want to see in the Apple Store when it comes back up? Let us know in the comments.

Wondering what Apple will call its new dock connector? No, it won’t be the “9-pin connector” — this is Apple we’re talking about, the company behind the Thunderbolt port. Instead, it’s expected to be labeled “Lightning,” and the kooky names don’t stop there. The Cupertino company is also expected to unveil a new set of earphones at its iPhone 5 event today, which will reportedly be called “Earpod,” along with a new iPod touch accessory called the “Loop.”

On Tuesday, it was reported that Vodafone Germany had received its stock of nano-SIMs for the upcoming iPhone 5, which is expected to launch on September 21. Vodafone U.K. has now confirmed — prematurely! — that it, too, has received half a million nano-SIMs, which are ready to ship to early iPhone 5 adopters.

On the eve of its big iPhone 5 event, Apple has seeded a new version of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 to registered developers in the Mac Dev Center. This marks the fourth beta update of 10.8.2 to be released in less than a month, indicating that a public release is imminent.

Unlike the last couple minor version of the 10.8.2 beta, today’s 12C50 update packs several new additions and improvements. Namely, Facebook integration has been fully baked into OS X itself, meaning that everyone should have access to Facebook in Mountain Lion when 10.8.2 drops.

The new iPhone 5 announcement is expected to happen tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. When all the excitement dies down, however, will the device have the staying power that its earlier versions had? Will it beat out Samsung’s new offerings? Will consumers, perhaps suffering iPhone fatigue, be looking for something that thinks even more different?

It does seem that we know all there is to know about the iPhone 5 and its accompanying operating system (iOS 6), but is that actually true? In an article about the high expectations for the iPhone 5 announcement tomorrow, The Wall Street Journal – well known to be the leak source of choice for Apple – drops a tasty tidbit in a seemingly innocuous paragraph.

The Shanghai Evening post sent a reporter into the Foxconn factory in Tai Yuan, China to pretend he was a new worker. His 10 days at the factory has been published as a diary, exposing the inside story of making the iPhone 5.

The Tai Yuan factory is known from the March workers’ strike, in addition to needing 20,000 extra workers to fulfill orders from Apple for the new iPhone 5, which is expected to be announced tomorrow at a special Apple event in San Francisco.

According to the Shanghai Evening Post, the reporter went through an extensive seven day orientation,which includes a form that all workers must sign to state that there are no environmental hazards. He began to work on the production line for the iPhone 5 on day eight. He was only able to stay two more days, due to the poor working conditions.

If this signage is to be believed, French carrier SFR will be offering the iPhone 5 come September 21st. While it’s expected that the next iPhone will go on sale in the U.S. on the 21st, international availability details have remained scarce.

The display is about a SFR contest to win a free iPhone 5 on the network once its available. The picture of the actual device is probably a mockup based on rumors, but this shows that SFR is getting ads together before Apple’s announcement.

Source: Mac4Ever

Last week FileMaker launched a new campaign to encourage businesses to adopt the company’s flagship database product line as an app development platform for the iPhone and iPad. The move is unique and the idea of FileMaker as an enterprise development solution does have its appeal – creating FileMaker apps requires no software development knowledge or experience and it can deliver native performance and functionality that HTML 5 web apps can’t.

Great news for fans of the popular tower defense game Fieldrunners. Subatomic Studios has announced the highly-anticpated release of Fieldrunners 2 HD for iPad!

The fully-optimized iPad version of the critically acclaimed sequel will launch in the App Store this Thursday, September 13th. Not only will the game look great on the iPad’s Retina display, but new weapons and surprises are included to keep you on your toes.

Former Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus left Apple last year, and now the revolutionary platform’s other co-founder has reportedly left Apple as well. According to Bloomberg, Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer recently left Apple for unknown reasons.

Apple bought Siri back in April of 2010 for a rumored $200 million, and Siri has since become a staple feature of the iPhone 4S and iPad. Given the imminent public release of the new and improved Siri in iOS 6, Cheyer’s departure is interestingly timed.

You might have heard that Apple is set to unveil a new iPhone tomorrow. Wall Street certainly has, and analysts have been predicting how many units Apple will sell out of the gate. Anticipation for the iPhone 5 is ridiculously high, and Apple is expected to shatter the records it set with the 4S last year.

While estimates vary, the general consensus is that Apple will sell between 8-10 million iPhone 5s in September, which would be huge for Apple’s last fiscal 2012 quarter.

While many Apple fans and IT professionals that support iOS devices in the workplace are eagerly awaiting tomorrow’s Apple announcement, a group of Apple in the enterprise experts are meeting at MacSysAdmin 2012 – a conference for European IT professionals tasked with managing Macs and iOS devices in business, education, and other workplace settings. The annual conference traditionally posts videos of its sessions online for free (as does the Penn State MacAdmins Conference that was held in the U.S. this spring).

That isn’t the only major conference for Mac and iOS IT professionals, however. October brings two other major events (one of them free) and there are a number of excellent smaller events scheduled throughout the fall.

FireCore today released aTV Flash (black) 2.0, the highly-anticipated update to its flagship software for the jailbroken Apple TV. Version 2.0 brings a number of enhancements, including a Library View for browsing media content by category (TV, movie, etc.), integrated search, and trakt.tv support for keeping content wirelessly synced between multiple Apple TVs.

Sadly, aTV Flash (black) still doesn’t support the third-gen Apple TV, as a jailbreak for Apple’s latest set-top box has not yet been released. But second-gen Apple TV owners can grab today’s 2.0 update now.

YouTube is synonymous with online video. As such, it’s a great resource to find music by your favorite artists, instructional videos, and even video podcasts. You may, however, have noticed that when you press the Home button, the app quits and you are no longer able to watch or listen to the video playing in the background.

Actually, that’s wrong. You *can* in fact listen to a YouTube video in the background, with a fairly neat workaround, brought to you by a frequent reader of Cult of Mac.

If you’re more than a casual cyclist, you might’ve considered buying a bike computer to track the details of your rides. But did you know, if you own an iPhone, you’re only one cycling app away from already owning the bicycle computer you so desire.

But you’re also going need a way to keep your new iComputer mounted to your handle bars during those long rides; and that’s where the excellent ReeCharge Case ($100) from BioLogic comes in.

Evernote Journal is a new, free, Universal app with one simple task: to get your daily journal entries into Evernote. There are already some very polished apps to capture your daily musings – Day One and Momento come to mind, but Journal has the avantage that it stores your daily entries in Evernote, ready for access (and export) wherever you like.

Upgrading to the iPhone every year is costly, but if you keep your iPhone in great condition, you can always sell it right before the next iPhone comes out and use that to supplement the cost of upgrading.

Knowing the best place to sell your iPhone can be the tricky part because there are dozens of places you can go to as each vendor is different and will  offer you different methods and prices. Here are the best places to sell your iPhone now so you can get an iPhone 5.

Pentax other announcement at Photokina this week concerns a pair of prosumer-level SLRs, the K5-II and the K5-IIs. These are the exact same camera, only the S has had its low-pass filter left off, and will cost you $100 more than the vanilla K5-II. The low-pass, or anti-aliasing filter allows for higher-resolution images, but could introduce unwanted moiré patterns into photos. Studio photographers will love it.

The way Apple handles preorders depends on a couple of things: how much stock they have and how in-demand they think their latest gadget will be. For example, when the third-gen iPad debuted in March of this year, Apple started taking preorders almost immediately, but last year, when they debuted the iPhone 4S, they waited for three days until midnight PST on Friday before taking preorders.

It’s easy to see why. Even though there were enough third-gen iPads to go around, preordering the iPad was madness, and brought Apple’s server to its knees. By starting preorders in the middle of the night, Apple can mitigate server load, since most people won’t wake up in the middle of the night to get a new phone.

No surprise, then, that it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will follow the same strategy this year, with the iPhone 5 not becoming available for preorder until Friday, September 14th at 12:00AM PST.

Apple will launch the next iPhone (presumably named the iPhone 5) along with iOS 6 tomorrow. The new iPhone is expected to pack a range of updates that will make it a much more significant release than last year’s iPhone 4S. The biggest expectation is that the iPhone will include 4G LTE support and that, unlike the new iPad, it will support LTE bands used outside of North America.

We won’t know all the details of the iPhone 5 until Apple’s unveiling at the Yerba Buena Center. There are, however, three important issues that business users and IT managers will need to in mind during and after following tomorrow’s launch event – all three of which could have a significant impact on bring your own device (BYOD) programs that encourage users to bring their personal mobile devices into the office.

Google was blindsided when Apple won its lawsuit against Samsung, which was really a proxy war between Apple and Google, because if Apple can defeat Google’s Android OEMs, they’ll win the battle against Google.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, David Lawee, VP for corporate development, says that Google hopes that they are over the hump in the thermonuclear war, and he also admits that Apple winning the lawsuit was a big wakeup call. Watch the clip below for the full details.

If you were to design a movie camera to be shown in a feature film, not to actually shoot it, it might look something like the new B&W Epic-M. But Red’s latest body isn’t just a prop. Neither is it cheap, but even at $47,000, it’s still a bargain.

There are couple dozen apps for iOS that will allow you to take a panoramic picture by scanning your iPhone over a scene and stitch the photos together into one really long picture. Most of them aren’t great, but Apple might release a feature of their own on the iPhone 5 that supports panorama photo mode.

The internet has been obsessed with the iPhone 5 so much the last few months that not much has been said about the iPod Touch. Last year Apple didn’t update the device, and some think it may go away altogether once the iPad Mini is released. Does Apple have one more update in the pipeline, and will it maybe look something like this?