Apple's next two iPhones had already been designed before Steve Jobs died in October 2011, according to comments apparently made by a liaison officer for the company last week.
At a meeting with the San Francisco district attorney, George Gascón, who is keen to cut phone thefts in the region, Apple's liaison officer Michael Foulkes is reported by the San Francisco Examiner to have said the designs for the next two phones "preceded Tim Cook [being chief executive]".
That would mean that both one phone due to be launched this year, as well as the iPhone 5, were already planned before Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, died in October 2011, just a day after the iPhone 4S was unveiled. A passage in Jobs's biography includes him testing out the Siri voice-control function that was introduced in the iPhone that October.
But while some – including Gascón – might be surprised by the idea of a company having a two-year pipeline for the design of a phone, others who have worked in the mobile phone industry emphasised that it is not unusual.
Horace Dediu, who runs the Asymco consultancy and previously worked at Finnish phone maker Nokia, said it was not surprising. "Having worked in a phone company, I think it's a given [that the phones were designed that far back]. Work under way now is for products shipping in 2016."
Other evidence of the long design pipeline for phones comes from BlackBerry, where the new Z10 and Q10 touchscreen phones have been in progress for more than two years, with delays to the BB10 software having held up their introduction by at least a year.
Source: The Guardian
