Ever since Apple released the first iPhone back in 2007, they have been on a yearly release cycle for new major revisions of iOS. As evidence, here are the release dates for every major version of iOS thus far:
- June 29th 2007, iOS 1.0
- July 11th 2008, iOS 2.0
- June 17th 2009, iOS 3.0
- June 21st 2010, iOS 4.0
As a result, most analysts and pundits predicted that iOS 5.0 would come out in the summer of 2011, probably in June. However, I have not been as confident about iOS 5.0 being released in the summer of 2011. And if yesterday's rumors are to be believed, there is a good reason for my skepticism. As for my reasoning, let's take a closer look at the iOS releases that came out last year:
- April 3rd 2010, iOS 3.2 — a total rewrite of the UI to support the iPad.
- June 21st 2010, iOS 4.0 — adds multitasking, folders, support for the iPhone 4 and Facetime.
- November 22nd 2010, iOS 4.2 — brings iOS 4 support to the iPad.
As you can see, from a pure version number perspective, there was just one major release of iOS in 2010. However, my claim is that the version numbering doesn't exactly reflect engineering reality, and each of those 2010 releases was actually a major version release. Because Apple had to radically alter the code base in order to support the iPad, they had to make a separate branch of iOS (the 3.2 version). It took the iOS engineering team over six months to integrate the iPad fork of iOS back into the iOS 4.x mainline. And so something had to give, and my gut was telling me that the thing that will be given would be iOS 5.0. Why? Because this has all happened before.
Back in the days when Mac OS X was the only operating system that Apple supported, there was a pretty long delay between when Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger shipped, and the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard shipped. The reason for this delay? Because during the Tiger time, Apple actually moved the Macintosh platform from PowerPC CPUs to Intel CPUs. Thus, Apple had to ship a new release of Mac OS 10.4, that worked on Intel. And even though the version number didn't change a much (it actually went from 10.4.3 to 10.4.4), internally this was a massive undertaking, which cost the Mac OS X engineering team a lot of time and effort. In fact, I believe that when Steve Jobs was demoing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at some point, he made reference to the fact that Apple actually had two major releases of Mac OS 10.4, the PowerPC version in the Intel version.
So fast forward to today, and you see how the launch of the iPad must have impacted iOS, and similar way in which the switch to Intel impacted Mac OS. So in that context, it actually makes sense that iOS 5 is going to be delayed from Apple's normal cadence of yearly summertime iOS releases. And it also follows that the iPhone 5 will be delayed, because they are almost certainly new hardware features in the new iPhone that require support from iOS 5. And it isn't Apple's style to release an iPhone 5 that is crippled by iOS 4, which lacks full support of any new hardware features (for example, NFC support).
And so it looks like the iPhone 4 may have to carry Apple's phone product line much farther than any iPhone before it. But fortunately for Apple, the iPhone 4 is an amazing product, and is easily up the task. In fact, after nine months of daily use I'm still immensely satisfied with my iPhone 4. In fact there is very little about the iPhone 4 that I would change — Apple really knocked this product out of the park.
If you are on the fence about buying an iPhone, and you were thinking about waiting for the still theoretical (at this point) iPhone 5, my advice would be to just go with the iPhone 4. It's a great phone, and you'll be really happy with it. And when iOS 5 is eventually released, I'm sure it'll work just great on the iPhone 4.
-Andy.