Why would Apple announce the iPhone 6 in June?

I was reading something today, which is a thing that I do from time to time, and this particular something happened to be on 24/7 Wall St. It was the rumor du jour that Apple just placed an order for 90 million units of the new iPhone. Neato! I mean, totally unverifiable, but neato anyway! As I continued to read, I came across a particularly interesting quote.

“The iPhone 6 is expected to feature a larger display, better camera and other features. It is expected to be announced in June, with sales starting in September.”

As rumor fodder goes, these are mostly pretty safe:

• Larger display: Almost certainly.
• Better camera: For sure.
• Other features: Well, I sure hope so.
• Announced in June, for sale in September: Wait… what?

I usually ignore the sillier of the iPhone rumors as soon as they pop up, but I was curious as to where the whole “June announcement” thing started. It seems to have originated from Chinese analyst Sun Changxu who told a Chinese-language site QQ Tech that “she expects” an iPhone 6 debut at WWDC. That guess was then repeated by a number of tech blogs and it became the go-to mythical debut date.

If this theory were to actually come to fruition, it would be the shortest time between the launch of a new iPhone and the announcement of its predecessor, as well as the first time in the Tim Cook era that a new iPhone debuted at WWDC. So, no, history isn’t exactly on Changxu’s side.

Add to that the whole “with sales starting in September” thing, which would put roughly three months between announcement and retail launch. Needless to say, that theory completely flies in the face of every recent iPhone launch. The length of time between announcement and release of the past 4 new iPhones goes like this:

• iPhone 4: 16 days
• iPhone 4s: 10 days
• iPhone 5: 9 days
• iPhone 5s/5c: 10 days

Apple would never announce a new version of an existing product with a 3-month gap until shipment simply because it would kill sales of the current-gen device. It’s not rocket science.

So what we have is a U.S. financial website regurgitating an off-the-wall expectation of a Chinese analyst to Wall Street investors. And we wonder why the stock market is always so damn confused (and wrong) about Apple.

So why would Apple announce the new iPhone in June? It wouldn’t.

[Photo credit: Simonpix]

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