On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:46:59 -0600, Tim McNamara wrote:
> They'd be dumb if they *weren't* working on the 4th generation iPhone
> already. They've probably got that in testing now and have people
> working on ideas for the 5th gen phone.
Don't know much about electronics manufacturing these days, but it seems to
me that it would take a least a few months to set up the manufacturing
facilities in Taiwan (isn't that where iPhones are made?) or wherever. And
they'd want to start manufacturing them a few months before they came on
the market to work out any bugs in the manufacturing process and to
stockpile some phones prior to putting them on the market.
I would bet that there are at least 3 parallel iPhone teams, maybe more.
Team A, working on next year's phone, is almost done, except for some
testing and preparing to manufacture them. Team B is midway through the
design of the 2011 model, and Team C is starting on the 2012 iPhone, or
will very soon. Something like that.
I think a lot of people have no clue as to how long it takes and how much
it costs to develop something like an iPhone/Pre/Droid. (I'm talking about
their similarities here, and all of them are clearly well-designed, even
though I might prefer the iPhone. The others are not just thrown together,
a lot of effort went into them as well) Unlike basic cell phones, which are
just cranked out like toilet paper, these high end devices are carefully
designed from the ground up. Although I haven't seen any figures from
Apple, others have estimated their development cost for the original iPhone
at $150M. Of course, each iteration is cheaper to design.
That's one of the things I like best about the iPhone. You can tell just by
using it for a few minutes, that someone thought about each part, each
step, each feature and someone was coordinating it all throughout the
process. Unlike my last Treo, which was obviously a kludge between some
cell phone and a Palm device.
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