iPhone 5 rush triggered by just one analyst's report ?!

Can we possibly endure another 9 months of endless speculation of what exactly the next Apple 5 smart phone will be like. The rumour mill has already gone into overdrive, and all it took was one analyst’s report and hundreds of articles have been spawned.

One of Apple's band of fanatical religious devotees

Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw expects the iPhone 5 to be a “cult classic” due to Jobs’ imtimate involvement with it. It “was the last project that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with from concept to final design. For that reason…this product will establish the high water mark for iPhone volumes” wrote Kumar.

 

Radical new design

 

The iPhone 5 will be a complete radical new design, according to an anonymous source reported CNET News. “This is a very large project that Steve dedicated all of his time to. He was not that involved in the 4S because his time was limited.”

 

This news has caused all kinds of frenzied activity all over the internet in specialist blogs and forums. What everyone is desperate to know is what the new phone will be like. They simply cannot wait, even though the iPhone 4S is flying off the shelves with 4 million sales in just three days and threatening to challenge Microsoft’s world record for the fastest selling consumer device which it currently holds for the Kinect Gaming system.

 

But already it is becoming clear that the success of the iPhone 4S is just going to be a warm up act for the iPhone 5 which it is almost universally expected to be launched in time for Apple’s Developer’s Conference in the summer of 2012. Kumar’s research note certainly thinks so.

 

Religious devotion

 

Back in May a BBC documentary was screened called Secrets Of The Superbrands which suggested that the desire for iPhones, iPods and iPads by Apple devotees can occasionally border on the religious. The extreme devotion of Apple fanatics to the technology brand was shown to be a form of religious devotion.

 

The journalist Alex Riley commissioned a test for the documentary which used an MRI scan for a team of neuroscientists to scan the brain of an Apple fanatic. The test found that the same part of the Apple fan’s brain lit up as a believer’s when they gazed upon religious imagery .

 

‘The results suggested that Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith,’ said Riley.

 

He likened the opening of Apple’s Covent Garden store in London to an ‘evangelical prayer meeting’. Many of the customers appeared appeared completely delirious as they flooded the store as they were hysterically cheered on by staff members. Many of them had slept outside the store and some had travelled from abroad even though there were no discounts available.

 

During the documentary, Riley spoke to the Bishop of Buckingham, who reinforced his conclusions. The bishop explained that Apple stores contain a lot of religious imagery: the stone floors, altar-like product stands and arched windows.

 

An idol does not have to be a piece of wood with a cross carved on it. Modern idols are much slicker and cooler.

 

A report from Texas A&M University makes the same point about Apple’s cultish following only being explicable in terms of religious devotion. It even christens the iPhone as “the Jesus phone”.

 

Will the new improved iPhone make the user “master” of their reality. What magic will they weave with this technological and aesthetically beautiful device at their disposal? But that magical creation will just have to wait until next June……..

 

The Agony and the ecstasy

 

But one former self-confessed Apple devotee will not be hanging on every nuance and rumour to come out of the Apple fan club.

 

Mike Daisey the monologuist whose show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is currently showing at the Public Theater in New York – “a tale of pride, beauty, lust, and industrial design”. A self-confessed lover of technology and especially the “bulbous and fruit colored” products from Apple.

 

“I am an Apple partisan,” he tells his audience. “I am a worshipper in the cult of Apple.”

 

Daisey  pays homage to the genius of Steve Jobs and the magic of the products he gave us. But he he is also a recovering “Apple fanboy,” who has not upgraded his phone since flying to China to see for himself how those slick toys are made.

 

Daisey’s perspective changed when posing as a businessman he visited the Chinese industrial zone of Shenzhen and interviewed hundreds of workers outside the gates of Foxconn Technology Group which employs 450,000 people. It is the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer.

 

He saw children as young as 12 years old who worked on the production line for up to 16 hours a day. The children are he said, taken off the line when inspectors visit.

 

Workers endure desperate conditions and undertake the same repetitive assembly tasks until the joints in their hands give out after a few short years. Suicide is not uncommon there, according to Daisey.

 

“I was woefully ignorant most of my life. Even though I love the devices deeply, I never had any idea how they were made and never thought about it in the least,” says Daisey, who said that he had always assumed that robots assmebled the iPads and iPhones.

 

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saw the monologue and by all accounts cried. “I will never be the same after seeing that show” he said.

 

Apple says that is committed to the highest standards of corporate social responsibility throughout its supply chain.

 

Current rumours

 

For what it is worth the general consensus for the Apple iPhone 5 is that it will have a slimmer profile and larger screen size, and have the same dimensions as the iPhone 4S. It is also expected to have LTE capabilities, or Long Term Evolution, also known as 4G connectivity.

 

The consensus is also that it will incorporate A6 quad-core mobile processors. Samsung “is allegedly ramping up production of the Apple-designed quad-core A6 chips in its manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas” to be used in the next iPhone according to 9to5Mac.

 

Despite their high profile patent disputes with each other Apple’s business with Samsung is said to be worth an estimated $8 billion in parts alone this year, which works out at roughly five percent of Samsung’s revenue.

 

There is also some expectation that there will be an entirely new type of casing.

 

As for the software it is anyone’s guess. iOS 6 Siri 2 for anyone?

 

The planning is well underway, and the insatiable appetitie for news and information is only going to get more intense. (http://therandomfact.com)