iPhone 12 release date delayed
The release of the iPhone 12 will be delayed Apple has confirmed.
Apple usually reveals the new iPhone in September and then release it a couple of weeks later. But the company has now confirmed they won’t be able to follow the usual schedule, with the iPhone 12 release seemingly being pushed into October.
“Last year we started selling new iPhones in late September, this year we expect supply to be available a few weeks later,” Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, told investors in a call following the company’s results.
Apple rarely discusses the existence of upcoming hardware but the company has presumably given the public indication because it has kept to such a reliable schedule for iPhone launches in the past, and without indication, customers would have likely presumed it would follow the regular schedule this year.
Mr Maestri did not say whether it would just be the release of the new phones that would be delayed, or if Apple was also planning to hold its launch event later than usual.
He did not give the reason for the delays but it has been widely speculated for months that the launch would be delayed amid problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
An early outbreak in China slowed down iPhone production and senior Apple engineers have been unable to fly to the country to check early prototypes. That is a key part of the process and happens before the product goes into mass production.
A delay had also been hinted at by Qualcomm, which makes chips for the iPhone. They said in its own results that it would suffer the “partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch.” It did not name the iPhone, but Apple is rumoured to be launching its first 5G iPhone later this year, and it is the only major 5G handset scheduled for that part of the year.
“We’re seeing a partial impact from the delay of a flagship phone launch,” Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala told Reuters in an interview. “And so what we’ve seen is a slight delay that pushes some of the units out from the September quarter to the December quarter for us.”
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