Forget the twelve month calendar, should we start measuring time in iPhone launches?

With a new iPhone appearing on the shelves at increasingly regular intervals, reporting on Apple can sometimes feel like a predictable merry-go-round

I have measured out my life with iPhone launches, as TS Eliot didn’t write. But he might have, if he’d have been The Independent’s technology editor.

There are plenty of other tech events that punctuate the year, of course. Every company hopes its big launches capture the zeitgeist. But the iPhone remains the biggest technology product in the world, and Apple (sometimes, depending on the mood of its share price) the biggest company in the world, and so its launches are probably the biggest moment in the technology calendar.

The actual event happens every September, and so we are about as far from a new iPhone as we can possibly be: the pre-Christmas flurry of discussion and digestion of the new models is all over, and we’re not expecting a new one until autumn. But that’s exactly the time rumours start to fly, and people start thinking about what that new phone might look like.

This time around, the looks are coming in glimpses from Apple’s supply chain: reports that the new phone will include three lenses, for instance, and the one after that might include a laser-powered camera that can see in 3D. At the moment, they are just glimpses, of course. But it’s important for us – and for readers – that we both relay anything authoritative and view the rest with suspicion, since those flashes of the future can have significant effects in the present.

Picking the genuine possibilities from the nonsense usually means setting it in context, alongside the kind of things Apple is given to doing. Having followed the company for so long is incredibly useful, because while it is given to exciting innovation, it also produces and releases those new technologies in surprisingly predictable ways.

In recent years that has become even more predictable: with iPhone launches we’ve tended to know what the phones are going to look like in intimate detail. Some journalists have even suggested this is a bad thing, spoiling the event itself by letting people look at what’s announced, usually in decontextualised and grainy ways. But there’s only one thing more predictable than the iPhone’s calendar – people want to learn about the phone faster than it arrives.

Yours,

Andrew Griffin

Technology editor