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Apple iPhone 5 rumors will remain rumors for another five to six months. In an interview with AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, Steve Jobs once said that he saw Apple primarily as a software company. But don’t you also do hardware, said Mossberg, pointing out the obvious. Well you know what they say, replied Jobs, companies that make great software make their own hardware.
That’s what Jobs said, or something very close to it. Now, people who have been completely swayed by the iPhone 5’s hardware rumors, might not have seen that interview, or paid enough attention. But here is the point; Apple sees itself primarily as a software company. The hardware is there it facilitate what the software is supposed to do.
That is why all those rumors about a 4 inch screen, a tear drop shaped body, about an NFC chip, etc somewhat miss the point. While Apple obviously has to keep up with the opposition, and it does need increasingly powerful hardware to meet the demands of its software, at the end of the day, the big announcement is going to be about the software not hardware.
Yes, Apple did bring in a camera that kind of puts point and shoot cameras out of jobs, which is incredibly fast, very smart, and the best on any phone, and yes it did introduce a dual core chip, but again that is why it wasiPhone 4S and not quite iPhone 5.
Remember that the big announcement with the iPhone 4S was Siri, the smart digital assistant. Though the hype around her has died a bit, it really captured the imagination of the market. No one could refrain from going rah-rah over it, and Siri was a software. One that is not really dependent on the excellent hardware that came with the 4S, Siri can be ported to iPhone 4, and to numerous other devices are hackers have shown.
When the five comes, expect it to come with big software changes. Which is not to say that it will not at the same time pack plenty of punch on the hardware side. Apparently, Apple has been working to do a design overhaul for sometime, and apparently the last time it could not push its suppliers to make the necessary changes in time.
Now, with 6 months in between, it should have been able to get those machines and those men in place who will implement the design changes. Some of Apple’s competitors, like Asus, and Samsung have got some really great hardwares into the market. The Transformer Prime is a great luscious piece of hardware, as is the Galaxy Tab 10.1, yet they have not really taken the tablet market by storm. Because they are bogged down by an apps market which is filled with crappy aaps, and they do not have the kind of tight integration between hardware and software that Apple’s products have.