Apple will begin production for it’s new iPhone 5 in August and will ramp-up production ready for a September release, according to a market analyst.
Katy Hubert, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, has returned from a trip to the far east where she visited numerous factories that are in some way part of the complex Apple supply chain.
According to Apple Insider, the clever girl was able to get companies who have multi-billion dollar contracts at stake to spill the beans to some stranger who appeared to have just asked nicely.
Now we’re certainly not totally convinced, but in a note to investors Hubert said, “Apple’s next iPhone will begin production in mid to late August and ramp aggressively,” leading her to guess that the iPhone 5 will arrive in September.
This seems to correlate with the expected release of iOS 5, OS X Lion and Apple’s iCloud service and would make sense in the run up to Christmas.
However, other noises from other financial folk in the know seem to think that there might be two phones. Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore believes that the ‘4S’ would actually be a contract free prepaid iPhone. The new low-end phone is expected to be moderately priced in the range of $300 to $500.
It would make perfect sense for Apple if they are indeed trying to capture a new market as when it comes to popularity, pre-paid phone plans beat long-term contract plans hands down.
The current mobile user base is expected to be around 1.5 billion and out of these, around 1 billion users are on pre-paid plans and thus are left out of the target market for iPhone.
With a pre-paid iPhone, Apple would jump into a whole new market altogether and if history is any indication then it may just re-define the segment.
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