We’re taking this one with a healthy dose of skepticism (and so should you) and purely for the sake of the discussion. Straight from Chinese-language site Sohu.com comes a story of an iPhone 5 delay blamed on the A5 chip overheating. If machine translation is to be believed, that’s why Apple pushed back the next iPhone launch from the usual June-July timeframe into the late August-early September timeframe. The story has it that Apple’s silicon team is facing difficulties keeping the dual-core A5 chip cool in the iPhone’s tiny enclosure where space and battery are at premium.
This has led the company to postpone the iPhone 5 launch for an unspecified period of time, but quite possibly into 2012. And there you have it, the iPhone 5 – described as a major, “revolutionary” upgrade – won’t arrive “soon”. The story also mentions that Apple will be transitioning to a 28-nanometer manufacturing process with the A6 chip, apparently due next year. The A5 chip that goes into iPad 2 is manufactured on Samsung’s 45-nanometer process and is almost twice the size of the iPhone 4’s A4 processor. If there’s any substance to this story, what then (if anything) will Apple release come this Fall?
